Getting Eaten Alive
by Tandrelmairon
Summary: The LoisClark relationship the way my sources say it developed, keeping only the legend basics as canon.
1. Chapter 1

_Author's note: I wanted to explore the Lois-Clark relationship the way I think it would develop in today's world, working off only the basics of the legend. No Richard, no Zod, and absolutely NO magic amnesia kisses._

The first time Clark made Lois feel like the villain of the week, he wasn't even present.

She had woken almost hourly the night before, heart pounding, mouth dry, feeling her career crumbling around her. She had tried all night to think of a way being partnered with him could be anything but a slapdown, from the one person at the Planet she trusted.

Perry, who had put her in Investigative when no other city paper had a woman outside the gossip and lonely hearts columns. Perry, who had never laughed at the water-cooler jokes that made her a ballbuster for pushing as hard as the men for a worthwhile assignment. As if there were a more appropriate, somehow 'feminine', method available.

Perry, who had always accepted that she did her job, not to prove things or shock people, but to speak the truth to power. And who, to her delight and astonishment, had watched her growth into a respected city watchdog with every appearance of pride.

Perry, who had then shackled her two weeks ago to a new hire fresh from his journalism major - not counting his years of 'experience' at the _Smallville Gazette_, circulation three hundred _counting_ the Sunday-onlies. So now she was sharing her bylines with a man whose major journalistic knack was disappearing before stories broke in front of him. A man who apologized his way through the day like bullpen machismo's answer to the offense of her existence. _Lois, we found the kind of guy you're looking for. _

There had been a few horrifying hours the first day, when she thought it was a joke that Clark was in on. Then she had realized he was being himself, and she was projecting on him a battle of which he was innocent. And oblivious.

So of _course_ she felt sorry for him. First as cannon fodder, and then as a pawn in Perry's inexplicable betrayal. She tried so hard with him to bite back the retorts that had become second nature to her – when had she gotten so sharp-tongued? She _did_ share her bylines with him, when they would have been easier to take than the candy from the proverbial baby. She knew he was gentle, honest and respectful – traits she was utterly unable to warm to, in her devastation at the symbolism of Perry's pairing him with her.

And then came the day that had touched off her sleepless night. Yesterday, when they took the wrong alleyway shortcut and the mugger who cornered them pulled off that wild shot, and poor Clark _fainted_. He wasn't a coward; in fact, she had been strangely touched, at the way he tried to protect her with his own body till the moment it gave out on him. It was just the hand he had been dealt, and he played it as best he could.

But not two hours later, right after hearing about it and exploding with due outrage, Perry was chaining him back up to her again. The only thing that surprised her at that point was that the implications for her future hurt less than the betrayal by her chief.

Which was why the next morning, eyes gritty, head aching, she found herself handling it the way she handled things more and more since starting at the Planet. Barreling in with guns blazing, demanding Perry's immediate attention, pacing around waving her arms and demanding justification, when what she wanted was his trust back.

"And it's not _any_ sort of standard procedure – what, that you developed since six _weeks_ ago, when King and Wechsler were hired without a baby-sitter of any kind? And I know _I_ never got one. I mean, for the love of God, Perry, technically I still have a job to do."

She stopped and looked at him, panting with the pent-up fury of the last two weeks - at him for doing this to her, and at herself for expecting anything different.

"Or why," she added stingingly, "don't you just give me the lonely hearts column and be done with it?"

He had been sitting at his desk since she burst in, with his fingers steepled, looking into her eyes, barely moving and, uncharacteristically, making no effort to interrupt.

As she fell silent, panting a bit, she looked down for a moment and then up around the room, at the overflowing bookshelves lining every wall surface with the books stacked two deep and haphazardly, and the one half-wall with all his award photos crammed together with their frames touching.

It occurred to her he looked older now than in any of them. Against her will she felt sorry for him, without being entirely certain why. She backed up into the couch and sat down. She willed herself to neither cry nor say another cutting thing.

"You know," he said thoughtfully after a moment, "you've had eight substantive pieces in the last two weeks. That's up twenty-five percent from your last year's average. I thought your exposition was a little weak in the first two – not everyone understands the relevance of city council positions now to state legislature positions in the fall. But you cleaned it up by the end of the week, and your fact checking was as excellent as always, including the shortcut you didn't take with the predigested demographics from the last census. Which would have been irrelevant."

She was _definitely_ not going to cry. She kept her eyes on the ground.

"Lois," he said softly. He got up and came around the desk and took a couple of steps toward her. Then he seemed to think better of it and sat back on the edge of his desk, pushing back four separate paperweights.

"I gave you Clark because you were the one I could trust to protect him."

She looked up and concentrated hard on keeping her lip stiff. He looked so tired.

"You really think I give a damn about symbols and implications? If I want to rein you in, there will be nothing symbolic about it." He gestured outside to the hall. "Clark would get eaten alive running around alone in Metropolis right now. Much less in here."

His gaze moved out the office window to the bullpen and then back to her. "Or have you maybe bought in to someone else's concept of career advancement?"

She felt it acutely as the unspoken question of betrayal that had been hanging in the room turned around squarely to face her. Her cheeks burned. _What have I become here?_

"Clark's exposition is better than mine, chief," she said softly, finally. "He handled that on the later articles. He…understands what it's like to not understand."

"Well, I'll be," he said mildly. She looked up and saw a trace of a smile, more in his eyes than his lips.

The weight of the world was falling away like water. _I gave you Clark because you were the one I could trust to protect him. _They looked at each other for a long moment, and she finally nodded.

"I think I have to go," she said abruptly.

He inclined his head politely and gestured to the door.

She made it out to the hall and then checked herself and stood there for a moment. She stuck her head back in. He was back behind his desk unfolding the morning edition. "Uh, Perry? I'm sorry." She ducked back out just as he was looking up, suddenly feeling too exposed to meet his eyes, and headed for the bullpen.

She might not be able to choose everything she became. Any more than brave, honest, fish-out-of-water Clark could choose when to faint. But she could choose who not to become. And she could do her job – which was, after all, to tell the truth in order to protect the innocent.

"Clark," she said as she passed by him, with his dark head bent down looking intently at whatever he was typing. It came out more abruptly than she intended. God, he typed fast.

He looked up through his coke-bottle lenses with his sweet half-daffy smile. "Oh, good morning, Lois! I didn't see you come in. How are you?"

"Clark," she said, sitting down beside him and slapping down the preprint copy on his desk, "you were on the scene here first, you did four of the five interviews, you did all the background, and oh, yes, then you wrote the article." She counted off his accomplishments on her fingers. "And _I_…let's see…I pressed play on the tape recorder."

She looked up at him. "So, Clark."

He blinked. "Yes, Lois?"

"You should be fighting me tooth and nail for sole author here. You can't hand out coauthor like candy any more, okay? You'll get eaten alive."

He blinked again.

"So you stand up now and take this down to the printer and give them the change, okay? And I'll fight you for the next one."

He backed up too far and hit the cubicle wall behind him. It shuddered and teetered for a moment. To her amazement, for a flicker of a moment, she saw him roll his eyes.

"Thanks, Lois," he said, bemused. "That's swell."

She almost closed her eyes and sighed again. But this time, a little more alert, she watched him through half-lidded eyes and was rewarded by a funny, knowing smile playing over his lips as he said the forbidden word.

She sat back in her chair and watched him go. What a day of wonders. Crack investigative reporter, indeed. There was some piece of him there she hadn't noticed. She wondered for the first time if he, too, always expected to be misunderstood.

_I gave you Clark because you were the one I could trust to protect him. _

It might be worth letting him come along on the crack house interviews today. On a suitably tight leash, of course, so he wouldn't get eaten alive.


	2. Chapter 2

The first time Lois made Clark feel like an utter heel, she wasn't even upset with him.

The day had begun with promise. He had been working for the Planet for four months and had published articles on corporate good citizenship; corporate corruption; education in the slum districts; crime in the high-rent districts; vagaries of city politics; the weekly near-miss urban catastrophes involving heights, fire or runaway heavy machinery; and Superman. He had been shot too many times to count and had rescued eighty-two people from certain death and five cats from treetops, and no one so far had tried to kill him with kryptonite, which he felt was a hopeful sign.

He had discovered that his greatest knack and joy was with the bird's-eye-views of the issues, mapping out whole systems of justice or production or social services for the people of the city to see and say, _That's why it works like that. That's structural violence, an unjust system. That's the weakest point. That's where I fit. _

He had also discovered within the first month that in order to be laughable as a secret identity candidate, he had to remind himself to drop or bump things once to three times daily and start most of his conversations with apologies, but his natural naïveté was entirely sufficient as it was.

In Smallville he had known some individual people to be petty, aggressive or manipulative. But all of his relationships were stable, broken in like old gloves, clear and honest. In Metropolis, where most of the people were strangers to each other and most of the games were zero-sum, the assumptions were different, and he couldn't adjust.

The other possibility that occurred to him in darker moments, that all of the same things went on everywhere and his naïveté was _truly_ hopeless, he refused to linger on. Some things had to be sacred. He was ruefully aware that most people wouldn't consider Smallville one of them.

As it was, he was aware of all manner of evil in principle, but he could never anticipate it in practice. It never occurred to him that _this_ sobbing widow could be twisting twenty-eight years of past or _this_ round-faced middle manager who doted on his children could be keeping two sets of accounting books. Not until Lois gave him her faintly exasperated, grouchily affectionate look and repainted the whole picture for him in the cab on the way back to the office. In retrospect he was always a little exasperated with himself as well. It seemed the only people he could learn to expect evil from were a quiet corporate physicist named somebody Luthor, who had given him inexplicable chills from the other side of a crowded press conference, and one or two sports writers in the bullpen who always made him think of the bullies of Smallville High.

Which was why he had found himself inordinately amused by getting a small victory out of the morning staff meeting. He had been at his desk reading their latest "final" draft of the latest Superman runaway train rescue, correcting Lois' atrocious spelling and making a mental note to do a fly-over of the whole urban track system _before_ the next time it happened. He was letting his tie dangle into his coffee and wick it up.

He recognized her footsteps entering the building five floors down, and fought his daily battle for the self-discipline to keep his eyes on the paper till he might reasonably have been expected to hear her.

Not until she swept by him, dropped her satchel on the desk beside him, and wordlessly fished his tie out over a paper towel, did he admit to himself he might have let it sit in there for that very reason.

He looked up at her sheepishly and was rewarded by that same afterwards-in-the-cab expression. He wondered if it would be in character to give it that name and point it out to her. _Probably not. _

"Are you ready?" she asked him, eyes now focused down on scrubbing the paper towel into little shreds on the bottom half of his tie. She tried with fair success to flick the shreds off with her hand, and blotted the back of the tie one more time before she dropped it and looked up at him. "I hate having to sit in that second row of chairs against the wall."

"Sure, Lois." He gathered up his papers and followed her in, and sat down beside her in the second row, where they always ended up despite her best intentions.

As the last few stragglers wandered in, he looked up at Mr. White sorting his agenda on the other side of the table. The Chief's eyes darted back and forth over his notes with every appearance of total absorption, but his heart was going over a hundred and twenty beats a minute and his pupils were dilated to five millimeters. _Good excitement_, Clark wondered, _or bad?_

"Hey, Clark," said Bill Wechsler, dropping down beside him with a friendly-looking whack on the shoulder. "People wear a lot of coffee-tone ties at the _Smallville Gazette_, circulation three hundred?"

He had sighed internally, disturbed by a parallel that rose up in his mind unbidden, between poking sticks at a country boy and using undocumented seven-year-olds as heroin mules in the clubs of Shadyside. He had known for a long time that the weak were preyed on wherever they went. But it always unnerved him to see it played out _between_ the law-abiding citizens, as an integral part of the normal lives he was trying to protect.

He heard the muscle units firing as Lois stiffened beside him. She always grew so upset in these situations, less about the attacks themselves than about the glove of friendliness over them. Whenever she took him aside, furious for him, in the aftermath of times like this and tried to explain what had just been done to him, it took all his self-control not to catch those small, wildly gesturing hands between his and say, "It's all right, sweetheart. Like in Goethe – _I do not understand everything, but still, many things I understand."_

Of course, part of her fury was her smoldering guilt at finding the sound of judgment in Bill's tone all too familiar. He would have liked to tell her to stop beating herself over that.

And of course, she would never have let him get past the word "sweetheart".

He snapped out of the moment's reverie when he realized that this time she was starting to get to her feet. Her store of patience, never large, had apparently been exhausted. In another moment she'd be up with her finger in Bill's face, if not her hands around his neck.

So he had looked up at Bill and smiled.

"Gee, Bill. It's so nice of you to include the Sunday-only subscriptions," he said cheerfully, with wide Clarkian eyes, "_every single time_ you bring that number up."

Lois choked on her black coffee beside him and punched him in the arm, which was reward enough, and relaxed a little in the chair.

He was spared having to find a way to embarrass himself again by Mr. White clearing his throat noisily for order. "All right, children, simmer down. King, you first. What have you got?"

The chief started down his usual rounds of the states of the pending pieces. But for most of the meeting Clark had found his attention wandering, from his poor little moment of triumph, to his half-conscious habitual scanning of the city's sounds for trouble, back to that same moment of triumph, and on to seven-year-olds recruiting _five_-year-olds as drug mules. Maybe it would be better to leave that part out of the article so the readers wouldn't jump off their rooftops in despair.

He was so preoccupied with six things at once that he was only half-tuned to finding out why Mr. White was so wound up. After it turned out to relate to the suburban branch of the Micelli 'family business', not his story, he tuned out entirely.

And so it didn't require any acting at all to look completely caught off guard a moment later, when he realized simultaneously that Lois' heart rate had jumped from her normal athletic baseline in the sixties straight to the one-twenties, and that Mr. White had fallen silent and was looking directly at him.

He thought again ruefully, as he had many times since coming to Metropolis, than in designing himself he would have focused less on superior sight and hearing and more on superior powers of concentration.

"Come on, Clark. Don't you have any questions?"

"What? Sure, chief. Uh…Whatever you think is best."

The editor blinked. "I realize it's putting you on the spot and all…but you can still ask me what I'm talking about."

He was undone beyond any chance of cover-up. No need to make a special effort to look clueless again after all. Clark shook his head to clear it. "I'm so sorry, Chief. What _are_ you talking about?"

"Lois, tell him what a 'sweet sixteen' is."

Lois turned and looked at him, her face solemn. "It's a 1930s term for your first undercover assignment, Clark," she said levelly. She looked back at the chief. "Appropriately enough it was first used, for undercover _police_, in the golden era of gangsters."

With the perfect clarity of his peripheral vision, he had kept his eyes focused forward while he watched the wordless gaze she turned on her chief. She was horribly uncomfortable, her heart pounding along so fast her that venous refilling was starting to back up. But she was visibly struggling not to say anything so publicly and gripping the armrests to keep herself seated.

The room was silent as Mr. White looked back at her steadily, with an not-unkind expression. The chief took a breath and steepled his fingers. Lois tilted her head and a faintly quizzical element came into her eyes. Clark was aware of something passing between them without knowing what. She sat back with a visible effort, took a deep breath and said nothing.

She had succeeded in holding herself back, for the first time in his recollection. He wondered if it would be in character to congratulate her afterwards. _Probably not._

Only then did Mr. White look away, back to Clark. "Not into the lion's den, son, of course. Just on the…expanding edge of the Micelli family territory. One shopkeeper to another, to find out what kinds of offers of 'protection' are being made in the neighborhood."

"Chief…wow! That's fantastic. Thanks, Chief. Mr. White."

He had pondered the ironies of going under cover with a third identity for the next fifteen minutes till the meeting ended. He thought about poor Lois, trying not to embarrass him in front of the whole staff, certain he would find a way to get himself hurt. Then he heard a fender-bender at the traffic light at Fifth and Reeve, and he got distracted again.

Later, packing his things for the day trip, he had heard snippets of Lois's private conversation with the chief. "-NOT ready for this. I thought you wanted me to protect him. So why are _you_ trying to get him killed?"

"In a _bookstore?_ Come on, Lois. The man's earned a chance for advancement. Do you want him to spend the rest of his life as your puppy? Actually, don't answer that."

He chuckled and kept packing.

Now, eight hours later, folded up on the floor with his arms cuffed behind his back around a ceiling pole, staring into the perfect darkness of a warehouse subbasement somewhere in Shadyside Industrial Zone, he realized that his naïveté was in fact far more dangerous than kryptonite.

Behind him Lois was breathing a little raggedly, cuffed around the pole with her back to him. He heard the breaths that should have been sobs slap up against her closed glottis, where she held them back. He was keeping silent, alone with his own grief and guilt. He was waiting for her breath to steady so she could reply to him without being, Loislike, embarrassed by her voice cracking.

His sweet sixteen had been doomed before it began. The little bookseller he tried to compare notes with, on encounters with menacing customers in trenchcoats offering devil's bargains, had been flagrantly terrified. He had wished acutely that Lois, skulking around the outside of the building looking for signs of family-style 'rearrangement', were there to read the expressions _behind _the fear. To say, _Oh, Clark, come on! The guy was dripping with not just fear but ambition. That sort of man would casually recommend a diner to us, and then call the family to sell us to them, in hopes they'll think of him when they need a man to run the front shop for a brothel._

_Let's go straight home, Clark, and not go drink cold coffee in an empty Shadyside diner with just the gray-haired night waitress washing up in back , where eight men can come in and grab us and put a gun to my temple and leave you to choose between watching me sob with terror and breaking your cover forever._

What surprised him now was finding that knowing she had never really been in danger was no consolation.

His perfect visual recall, usually under his voluntary control, was firing randomly every few moments on that single image - the devastation in her brown eyes, the gun against her head - in a pattern he recognized as an early post-traumatic stress disorder criterion. _Exposure to the felt threat of death or grave harm, or witnessing another person exposed to the same, combined with a sense of personal inability to stop it. _

_I had hoped to avoid ever feeling that last part._

"Lois?" He couldn't stand it any longer. "Are you all right?"

She laughed raggedly in the darkness and he felt a little ray of hope. "This really makes me appreciate _my_ family. My wrists hurt, is all. What about you?"

'_You don't have to point that at her,' he had said in the diner, letting his voice tremble a little. "I don't want any trouble. Be a man and turn it on me if you want." _

_And whether it was the honor element of Sicilian machismo, or the confidence that the unstable moment had passed, the stubbled one had lowered the gun and motioned the others to take hold of their arms instead._

"Uh…I'm all right. I…I think I'm sitting in something."

She snorted and then lost control of the next few breaths and then locked it down again. "I'm sorry. At least it doesn't smell like a puddle of gasoline…"

"…with a trail up the stairs to a cigarette lighter someone's about to drop, yes," he finished ruefully for her. Was it possible she was taking this better than he was? Could she even have been hamming it back in the diner? "But I think our chains are tangled up together. If I move back like this –" and he reached back to pinch her cuffs out like dough between thumb and forefinger, stretching them just slightly –"does it help?"

She jiggled her hands a little and said, astonished, "That's _much_ better. I thought they were just too tight."

"Good. I hate when the cuffs don't fit properly." _Get hold of yourself, Kent. You're not going to erase the last hour from her soul by making her feel obligated to laugh. You're out of character. If you have to do this, if she has to go through this, do it right._

_Do it right, so the other people you love don't wind up like this some day, staring into the stinking darkness, only this time alone without you in a soundproof room lined with lead, wondering why their son hasn't come to save them, while you find out if you can bear to do whatever devil's task is set as their ransom._

"I'm so sorry, Lois," he said wearily after a moment. "I didn't know what to do." With unfeigned bitterness he added, "This one really was a job for Superman. I'm sorry you got me instead."

She was silent. Not wanting to hurt hapless Clark, he thought, but unable to lie to him, poor inflammable girl whose gentle heart got control of her at the most inconvenient times.

Then he heard the chains clinking behind him and felt her little hand on the back of his. It was cold; the fight-or-flight response was clamping down all her peripheral vessels to shunt blood to the heart and brain. He kept himself from warming her hand between his by reminding himself it would only make her feel awkward.

"Clark," she said softly, "I know you won't believe this, but I don't actually compare you with him."

He froze, feeling suddenly, strangely, like a man wandering at home who saw a new door unfold out of the wall in front of him.

"We all play the hand we're dealt. He got…powers and wonders, and he plays them well. You and I…that's not our hand. We just do our best."

Sitting there in the dark and the silence, the words touched him like a lick of fire in a part of his soul he'd never known existed. He felt them sink into him, without knowing where they went or what they touched. He looked up wordlessly into the darkness. It made him think involuntarily, illogically, of waking up in grade school on the first day of summer vacation.

He was about to try to fumble together some way to thank her, something to say that would be both in character and real, for giving him such an otherworldly gift in such small words.

Then he realized a few moments had passed, and suddenly she was sobbing aloud.

"Clark," she got out between gasps, "the barrel was so cold." He felt her shuddering in the vibrations transmitted through the pole. "It was so cold. I don't know why."

Feeling like another man would have felt from a punch in the stomach, afraid he might literally vomit, Clark learned something new that moment. None of the little games of might-have-saids, might-have-dones that he'd thought of as daily trials of his resolve had been anything of the sort. What took all his strength, what left him trembling and short of breath, was keeping himself from peeling off their handcuffs like paper, lifting her off the floor and cradling her dark head against his chest and saying, "It's all right, honey. Superman's here."

Instead he fished a tissue out of his back pocket and passed it into her hand, and then they both laughed bitterly at that futility, with no way to get it to her face.

Through the blindfold on the way in, he had seen demolition signs on the hacked-down doorway. The building was scheduled for tomorrow. They would be found on the sweep-through within six hours.

And never again, he decided in the stinking darkness, would he pretend his double life hurt no one but himself. She was too close to not be burned by it. He would always be able to give her safety, and never security. Keeping his cover would cause her hurt again and again, in small ways and large ones.

But at least he would never again pretend otherwise. He would never again play the victim with his self-pitying, if-only, romantic fantasies. Because any time he did, he would be back in the Shadyside Diner, watching her with a gun at her temple while he stood there, with all the power and the glory of the blood of Krypton and the sun of Earth in his veins, and did nothing.


	3. Chapter 3

The first time Lois uncovered one of Superman's secrets, she didn't even get a byline. By the end of that day, it was the last thing on her mind.

The day began grey, still and silent. The cool, overcast streets of Metropolis were misty and nearly empty on her way in.

When she stepped into the bullpen the atmosphere was subdued. The Planet, like the city outside, was still crouching, like a beaten dog who thought this whipping was over but knew it had been fooled before.

Her head hurt and her body ached like it had for a week, as if it had forgotten how to heal. She stood on the threshold of the newsroom, looking around a little aimlessly. Her thoughts were grinding along slowly. She shook her head and pulled it together enough to head for the coffee machine.

For a week till the day before yesterday, the people of the city had been locked in their homes, eating food from cans, stuffing wet towels under their doors, and throwing their radios out their high-rise windows onto the streets below. A few, with a heartbreaking ignorance of auditory anatomy, had tried cutting their ears off with their own kitchen knives.

All had been desperate together to keep from hearing the same seven-note tonal sequence, playing out at random-seeming intervals, from changing corners and alleys of the city. Presumably, from speakers, that no one had manufactured and no one had installed, and afterwards no one could find.

Of those they were caught in it, ran all the eyewitness reports, some started screaming and others just leaned on the walls and wept. All went stumbling off into the streets, sometimes running from things that weren't behind them, spilling out half-coherent details of all their precious and guilty secrets to anyone and no one. It was beginning to look as if most of those confessions, when understandable, were true.

Even otherworld-weary Metropolis, a city growing hardened to being the battleground of evil geniuses and the crossroads of the warring dimensions, had discovered it could still be shocked.

She looked back over the typing desks as her cup filled. Clark was already there, holding up his forehead with one hand and circling words with another. She filled another cup for him, two creams and two sugars. It always made her think of the way a five-year-old would take coffee, given the choice.

For the last week she had been running the dispatch flyers, churning out speaker location updates four times daily to warn a city that had become afraid of its televisions and radios. She had been typing on bone-sore fingers and sleeping four hours a night. She had been trying with mixed success to hold herself back from being snappy and unjust, while Clark ran the _Planet's_ perp investigation and silently steered her away from opportunities to spill coworker blood, and thought she didn't notice.

She had even been, she realized with a flash of gallows amusement as she stirred in the creamer, too tired to maintain the involuntary awe of Superman that still plagued her, when the Man of Steel landed on her balcony two nights before.

She had been hunched over the coffee table reading the last Reuters bulletins on the crisis, hearing the thunder crack outside and praying that maybe the humidity would ruin the speakers. And then, as in a handful of times before, there was a moment when she realized she wasn't alone.

Usually it made her heart pound and her mind go blank with confusion, while her feminist sensibilities cringed in embarrassment.

The Man of Steel, she had long ago reluctantly admitted to herself, had the same effect on her he had on everyone else: awe, a sense of smallness, the eerie conviction of being in a strange and holy presence. And the urge to either fall silent or babble uncontrollably.

Unlike most people, though, she suspected, she found that feeling utterly distressing. There was a Lincoln quote she had once come across that had never left her. "A woman is the only thing I am afraid of," he had said, "that I know will not hurt me." Lincoln, at least, had understood.

And so she spent most of her energy, in his presence, on forcing herself to act like an adult – _ideally, a reporter_ - and not a starstruck groupie. He never stayed long, the rare times he came to her for news, and she had begun to suspect it was out of tacit deference to her own inability to handle it. Which made it all that much worse.

The situation was helped not at all by all the recent romantic nonsense circulating about the two of them in the tabloid press. She shuddered to think what he would think if he came across it.

That night, though, ground down with fear, it was purely relief that she felt when she saw the iconic form outside, his cape shedding the rain and those massive shoulders, always still like the single pivot point of the universe, housing their silent and godlike power.

_Thank God, it's only Superman. _

Usually on his rare, unpredictable visits, always scrupulously proper, he waited outside for her. This time, apparently feeling that a talk out in the open air might not be quite the thing, he rapped on the patio doors and she got up to let him in.

He hesitated in the dark just a moment. Then he stepped over the threshold into her apartment for the first time in the year they had known each other. He reached behind him and drew the doors closed.

He looked around briefly, curiously, at the bright little den in the lamplight. Then he looked back down at her and folded his arms across the great crest on his chest.

They said together, simultaneously, "Are you all right?"

She nodded. "Can I get you something?"

He shook his head. "Thank you. There's no time." He ran his hand through his coal-black hair and studied her for just a moment with that dark alien gaze she had always found so unreadable. Which of all the chaos of human thoughts was he subject to?

"Clark's all right, too," she said after a moment. "He's killing himself, of course. But otherwise, all right." She thought about him, typing like a madman with a phone on each shoulder and his glasses slipping down his nose, and smiled.

She had realized early on that out of all Metropolis, the Man of Steel had chosen her quiet, spectacled partner as his confidante, and she thought well of him for that.

It had taken longer for her to notice that he seemed to like her company as well, in his enigmatic way, beyond regularly saving her from the burning buildings and twenty-story falls that were her occupational hazards. And then she had slowly come to realize, through their rare conversations on her balcony when he came for news, that there was no haughtiness in his reserve, that he was gentle, honest and respectful.

She could see it, and was aware when he was present that she genuinely liked the big, quiet superhero, while simultaneously wrestling with utter self-consciousness every moment of it.

He smiled briefly. "Good. Can I ask, what have they given you on the latest appearances?"

"What time frame do you want?"

"Six hours."

"Three downtown in the fashion mile. One on the East Side, at the entrance to the third ward park. One at the Shadyside subway stop. Do you want the layover map?"

He shook his head. "I'll remember. How are your dispatches getting out?"

"All right, so far. But we're running out of safe delivery routes. They're going to start taking longer." _This is so much easier_, she thought irrelevantly, _with the help of exhaustion and disaster_.

He nodded. "I may be able to help with that, if it comes to it. At some point that will take priority. I'll check back with you tomorrow."

She nodded. "I'm going to try something different in the morning. Nobody's talked yet with the actual victims. We don't even know if they…answer questions. Maybe I'll be able to tell you –"

"Lois," he said softly, "don't do that." He reached out and almost took her shoulder and then, as he always did, thought better of it and dropped his big hand. "You have to stay away from them. Don't get anywhere near them. Don't let them get near you."

She blinked, baffled. "The victims?" There had been no reports of any assaults or aggression by any of them.

He nodded.

"Why?"

"Please, tell me you won't do it."

"Why?"

He shook his head. "I have to go. I promise you, they won't answer your questions. They'll just keep making their confessions. Please, don't do it." And he turned to leave.

It was so typical of him that there in that waking nightmare, with her city turning slowly into hell around her and its only hope standing in blue and crimson in her living room, she found herself momentarily simply exasperated.

Everyone knew the Man of Steel didn't lie. What no one else seemed to notice was that he sucessfully avoided every question he didn't want to answer. She was beginning to suspect that an urgent crisis elsewhere was one of his favorite tricks. "_Superman_."

He turned back.

She opened her mouth to make her usual futile effort to get more from him, to appease the god of reporters. But looking into those weary, holy eyes, she hesitated just a moment. What sort of struggle left Superman so tired?

Then he seemed to shake it off.

"And Lois," he said, after a moment, as she was just about to speak, with a ghost of a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. "About the articles in the _Enquirer…"_

_And his other trick is distraction! _

_And it's working._

"…when this is over, please, try to discourage that as much as you can. So will I. It's dangerous for you, to have anyone think you might make a good hostage to control me."

_Keep on target. Chew through that one later. _"But about the victims…the people of Metropolis should know, if-"

He shook his head. "I'm truly sorry. I can't answer you. Please stay away from them."

And then he was gone.

And then the next morning, as the Planet reported triumphantly, Superman had saved the day. He had managed at last to catch a hired thug in the act, installing a little self-degrading one-use speaker. Through him came the distribution gang and their equipment. The sting went down that afternoon and the city was safe. None of them had known who they took their orders and their payment from, or why seven notes that did nothing when played by ordinary instruments could drive men mad when they came from these speakers.

Which made a reasonably good initial article, and Lois, exhausted, was for once in no mood to dig deeper.

Not that she had a choice.

_You have to stay away from them._

A cup in each hand, bracing herself before starting down that path, she set down her satchel beside Clark. Wordlessly she handed him his coffee and then noticed there were three empty ones on his desk already.

He gave her a brief, grateful smile. "Hey, Lois. Would you maybe look over these for me?"

She smiled slightly. Clark was always a little helpless right after a major Superman rescue. She had noticed it for almost a year now, but still didn't understand it. For two or three days after every near-catastrophe, he spoke very little, dropped everything he touched, and stuck to her like glue. She had long ago abandoned the thought that he was resentful of the Man of Steel – it was hard to imagine Clark resentful of anything. But those stories seemed to affect him in some deep, involuntary way, and it always took him a couple of days to bounce back.

Not, she thought wryly, that she felt at the moment like a paragon of resilience herself.

So she put her hand on his shoulder silently for a moment and then took the first article from his hand and sat down.

It was the timeline and analysis of the crisis Perry had asked him for. In usual Clark style, he had handed out anonymity and off-the-record like candy to everyone who asked for it. He could never learn to be rough in the service of truth. And in usual Clark style, she thought, sipping her black coffee, it was surprisingly good regardless.

Then she hit the part about how the greatest speaker density had been in the slums, about the strange almost-pattern of their appearances and removals. And then the blank space where the conclusion ought to be.

"_Clark_."

He looked up, his dark eyes enormous behind his herculean prescription. "What's wrong? Too choppy?"

"No! The part about the speaker distribution."

"Too speculative?"

"No." She blinked a couple of times and looked back down. …_a pattern especially notable for its total inconsistency with the geography of low-hanging potential power access…_ "No. I think you might really have something."

"I have everything," he agreed cheerfully, "except a conclusion."

Lois sat back and tried to corral her sluggish thoughts into order. "You've already chased it down all the standard lines?"

"I did income levels, zoning districts, ethnic majorities, zip codes, police precincts, voting records–"

She had a vision of the just-defeated outgoing Mayor Daley, cackling as he whipped up revenge in in an evil electronics lab in his basement, and laughed involuntarily. "What about paper subscriptions?"

"Oh, I already know the _Star_ was behind it," he said gravely, with the flawless Clark deadpan it had taken her six months to recognize. "And I can't prove it yet, but behind the _Star…"_

"…is Satan," they finished together.

He gave her his sweet smile for just a moment. Then the exhaustion came back into his face and he rubbed his temples.

He was definitely fighting a Clark funk. She would probably wind up having to bring him lunch, or he wouldn't eat all day.

"The only thing I've been thinking about that I haven't checked yet," he said after a moment, "is industry ownership."

She blinked. "That's not a bad idea. But it would be…difficult. Very time-consuming. Because you'd have to trace each factory's parent company back to its fifty minority shareholders, that then turn out to all belong to the same holding company. You can't stop till you hit _people_. I don't think you've done that before. You think you're up to it right now?"

He smiled wryly. "I really look that bad? Maybe this afternoon, then. Maybe this morning Jimmy will let me do some of his obituaries."

Lois laughed.

Then he reached over for the second piece and a new little note of weary pride came into his voice. "Now, read this one."

He reached out to point at one line, and Lois, with a dark premonition, caught hold of his coffee cup just before his sleeve brushed over it.

He gave her his typical sheepish look, but there was a peculiar absentminded reflexiveness to it.

"Start with…well, start with the beginning." And then he was up and off, no doubt in genuine search of Jimmy for extra obituary work.

Watching him go, she was puzzled, as she had been more and more often lately, at the way he hid his burning intelligence behind those coke-bottle lenses and overturned coffee cups. There were some elements, like the tie in the coffee trick he pulled once every two weeks, that seemed to purely amuse him. But there were others, like his willful near-total obliviousness to bullpen one-upsmanship and mutual exploitation, that she found baffling in light of the analytic abilities so patent in his work.

_And that can be my investigative piece for tomorrow. Because all of Metropolis will care. _ She turned back to the second article.

It was his followup work to the week's crisis, on picking up the pieces, a fluff topic he had cheerfully accepted.

He started with Superman giving the press briefing, in his usual simple manner, with an utterly characteristic tribute to the civil servants of Metropolis. "The heroes of this city are its corps of civil engineers, who uncovered the workings of this plan at tremendous personal risk, and pinned down its weakest point. They, and all the civil servants who kept the skeleton services running, are the ones who should be answering your questions. Thank you."

From there he had gone on to the week's war-stories of those very people. And the wives and husbands, parents and children who had followed their jabbering loved ones across the open spaces for days and nights through the deadly broken silence of that week, to keep the more standard city predators at bay.

And he finished with the unlooked-for miracle that had followed the end of the nightmare. The morning after, when those who had gone mad picked themselves up trembling off the streets, not sure how they had gotten there, but all half-remembering the same nightmare, and went home to their families and showers. The moment when Metropolis had begun to heal.

In the dull weariness of that gray morning, looking up across the room at him and Jimmy laughing over something, she found herself smiling.

She had been a devoted and, she admitted, sometimes ruthless servant of truth for all her adult life. She had chased down hypocrisy, exploitation and corruption in its service with a fury so intense it sometimes woke her from sleep, and sometimes disturbed even her.

And she couldn't have made this piece work. Shining quietly throughout it, top to bottom, was Clark's gentle, equally intense love for all manner of truth. Not only for exposes but for backstories, nuances, silent understandings, extenuating circumstances. _And imagine if he'd just try for an assignment he didn't have to _make _worth doing ._

Lois circled and annotated a couple of places where he was shy of data. Then she set aside Clark's issue to wrestle with her own, the Man of Steel's enigmatic warning.

_Don't go anywhere near them. _

She sighed and got up in search of the latest tallies on the casualties.

She stumbled through the rest of that day, half-working on her real projects, circling back to the problem between crises, and trying to keep Clark from beheading himself with the file cabinet.

And finally, when she got home, her head still throbbing, she locked the door behind her, rubbed her eyes, took a deep breath and went to the balcony door.

She found herself hesitating a moment at the threshold, struck by how quickly it had come to feel wrong to step outside. Then she made herself step out and close the doors behind her.

The evening air was cool and smelled cleaner than usual. She leaned on the balcony rail, took a deep breath, and waited.

Then she heard his groundfall behind her, as she had suspected she would.

Superman came up silently beside her at the balcony, his cape lying like heavy velvet in the still air. She looked over at him, thinking of the strength that could bend the course of the planets curled up at rest in those massive arms, always ready in the way eternity was always ready.

Thinking of the fact that two hours and sixty pages into her search, the obvious conclusion had been confirmed. Eighty-two people had, in fact, gone mad in areas where no speaker was in earshot. She had been struck by the image of a hapless commuter turning the corner and running into one of those shambling horrors of a man…humming a seven-note tune.

How many people had turned and hummed that tune to the sisters, husbands, children who tried to follow to care for them?

No wonder Superman had looked shell-shocked.

He folded his arms across his broad chest beside her, looked at her, and waited for her to speak. She tried to keep focused straight ahead, wondering if it would postpone the Superman effect, wondering if it would still affect her at this moment.

"Why didn't you want people to know it was…transmissible?"

Unsurprised, he sighed and looked out over the skyline silently for a moment. "Because I knew by then it was also reversible. Because half of this city is armed, and people would have started sniping the victims from their windows."

And he was, of course, right.

_And you were afraid, if you told me, I'd publish it? And would I have?_

Instead she asked, "What was it?"

Fixing her gaze ahead, over the streets cutting between the high rises and the many-colored cars crawling along below, she saw him from the corner of her eyes. He looked at her for a long moment.

Finally he said, "I don't understand it completely. It was…an unresolvable tension. An imperative question. And whatever it was, none of them knew the answer. They went mad trying to answer it."

She took a deep breath, and turned and looked at him. "How many of these secrets do you keep?"_ And do I get to be upset about them?_

He smiled briefly, almost helplessly, as if the question itself were funny. Then he looked grave again. "As few as I possibly can. I'm…sorry it makes things harder for you."

What did truth demand, in such a situation?

She was silent. A year ago, she realized, she had been sure what was owed to the world and the people of Metropolis. A year ago she had been confident all secrets were dark ones, and that truth was synonymous with exposure. She thought, irrelevantly, of Clark knocking over his coffee and the gentle brilliance in that aftermath piece.

"Lois…it's probably best I not be here in broad daylight." An escape, or the simple truth. Or both.

"Be safe," she said finally, softly. "Thank you for warning me."

He checked himself, in the act of crouching to take flight, and turned back to look at her. "It really is as few as I can."

Then he was gone.

And so she was in a pensive mood when she came back to her desk at nine that night, after breaking down and napping. She felt much steadier after the nap; unlocking the deserted press room and coming in through the after-hours half-darkness, she felt almost like herself again.

Until she picked up the evening preprint of the next morning's edition from her desk, and saw the front-right corner article, with Clark's idea under Bill Wechsler's byline.

Standing there, staring down at the 64-point headline - "Luthercorp Properties Spared Alone: No Speakers Found on Company Grounds" – weary disgust struck her such a sideblow that the pages rattled in her hand.

_Two days ago we weren't sure if we would live or die or go crazy. Who survives something like that and gets right to work stealing stories about it? Who thinks he's in second grade and can get away with this?_

From force of habit, she catalogued simultaneously, _Luthercorp knew this was coming. They must have bought themselves protection from their underworld contacts…instead of, God forbid, warning the authorities._

Gripping the preprint up to the light and watching it tremble in her fingers, she heard soft footfalls and then smelled Clark's aftershave behind her. He was becoming as bad a workaholic as herself.

Without turning around, barely keeping her voice steady, she said, "I will _end_ him."

"Lois, what are you doing here?" he asked softly. He came around in front of her and leaned back against the desk, facing her.

She turned the preprint around and handed it to him, not trusting herself to speak.

He took it from her fingers and looked down at it, briefly, and then back up, and smiled ruefully at her.

He was, she realized, utterly unsurprised.

Because, no doubt, this wasn't the first time.

She had the sudden heartbreaking conviction that, surrounded though he was by a chief and a host of colleagues who loved him like a wayward, accident-prone little brother, Clark had watched this happen – how many times? - and never said a word.

"Clark," she said, trying for his sake to keep her voice as gentle as she could. She took hold of his big hands where the paper rested. They were warm, and she realized for the first time that the room was a little chilled. "Why didn't you ever tell me? He's finished here. I'll take care of it."

He looked down at their hands, holding his very still, and seemed to gather his strength together. He looked back up at her, his dark eyes grave and wide behind his glasses. "Please, don't. What matters is that the story gets out, right? The truth, not the byline."

"That's drivel, and you know it."

He laughed once, and looked up at her with helpless affection, the article clearly forgotten in an instant. "Don't bottle things up inside all the time, Lois. It's not healthy. Tell me what you really think."

Six months ago, it occurred to her in passing, he would never have made free to tease her. _And no one else_ _does now. Not even Perry._

"I think – you're making jokes about this? Is that always how you cope with journalistic rape?"

He blinked at her, surprised, and Lois felt a little ashamed and looked away.

After a moment he said, solemn again, "Does it really seem like such…incarnate evil to you? After everything we went through in the last week, does one guy stealing a story, because he doesn't know what else to do, really remind you of that thing with the fifteen-year-old cheerleader in Shadyside?"

She sighed, remembering that Superman rescue that had come almost too late, and how dismal and withdrawn Clark had been for a week afterwards, as if he couldn't get it out of his head.

"It was a cheap analogy. I'm sorry. About the analogy."

She rubbed her eyes and stepped back, saddened, her heart still pounding from the anger of a moment before. She looked at her closest friend, his long legs folded up in front of him as he sat on the desk with his feet on the swivel chair, troubled not at all by his situation but deeply by her description of it.

_Why does he do this? Why is he so indifferent to being dismissed and underestimated, not just by this overgrown middle school bully, but by his friends? _

_Why does this man, who loves truth and backstory so much, accept sitting in the shadows all the time?_

"Clark, why?"

He looked at her and tilted his head. "Why what, exactly?"

She came back and stood in front of him, feeling a little reckless, as if she were back stepping out over that balcony threshold.

"Why do you let this stuff happen? God, no, you invite it. Everyone else can think you don't notice, but I know you do. You know better than this."

Seeing the nonplussed look on his face, she relented a bit. "Look, I'm not upset with you. I just…you know you're worth ten of him. Why do you let this happen to you?"

He was silent for a long moment. "Most of the time, I really _don't_ notice the coffee," he said absentmindedly, as if to himself.

_The coffee?_

He looked up at her with those dark, expressive eyes searching her face. "Does it really hurt you that much?"

_Watching the innocent get trampled in front of me? Or knowing there's any truth at all that goes unexposed? _

_Or knowing that with all my charging around in the name of truth and the innocent, I can't get anything out of Superman and I failed to protect you?_

"Are you so used to it," she said finally, "that it doesn't even hurt _you_ any more?"

As she watched, there was a kaleidoscopic shifting in those eyes, as if, locked unmoving in some subterranean struggle, he finally simply ceased.

Clark sighed and ran a hand through his unruly hair. In a different tone he said, "All right, sweetheart. It's all right. I'm sorry."

He leaned forward and steepled his fingers, eyes fixed on her face.

"I let him take this story," he said gently, "once I realized where it was going. Because I don't want three articles attacking Luthorcorp inside of a month to all carry my byline."

She blinked.

He had been looking in a different direction all along.

It was as if the earth beneath her had suddenly turned lucid, to reveal vast and nameless behemoths gliding along silently that had been there forever, under her feet.

_Luthorcorp?_

_Sweetheart?_

"You gave it to him?"

"Well, no, I didn't." He smiled wryly. "But it does work out well this way for both of us." And then he laughed out loud, once, as if he couldn't help it.

He looked, she realized, exactly as if had been holding it back for years.

The other explanation for his amiable tolerance of the way he was treated, she realized belatedly, was that it had nothing to do with either habit or ignorance. That it came from a self-confidence so vast and profound, he had never felt threatened at all.

"Clark, what…what on earth are you playing at?"

He was silent for a long moment. "Well," he said finally, "I didn't realize it bothered you this much."

She waited.

"And Lois, there are things I…like very much about being seen this way." He looked directly at her. "It's so much easier to talk with people."

She thought for a moment, irrelevantly, of her faltering conversations with the Man of Steel, and then of Clark laughing with little Jimmy over the layout. It occurred to her Clark was probably a great deal easier to talk to than she was.

_Stay on track._

_I don't want three articles attacking Luthorcorp inside of a month to all carry my byline._

"So those are the perks…but your _real_ reason for acting oblivious to office politics is so people will steal your stories, so Luthorcorp doesn't mark you as an enemy? That's not a bit of overkill, for an expose on one irresponsible company?"

He smiled for a moment. Then he looked grave again, for all the world like a small child about to swallow his medicine without a fight. "The…work I'm trying to do is very long-term."

She blinked. "This is still exposing Luthercorp we're talking about?"

"It _includes_ exposing Luthercorp, yes," he said carefully. "There's more there than you think. But Lois…" He spread his hands helplessly. "I can't tell you any more about it."

"Is Perry part of this? _Jimmy?"_

He looked up at her. "Lois, I'm sorry. I can't."

"And what will they say, if I ask them?"

"Please don't."

_So that's a no._

She looked at him in utter confusion, this sweet-hearted man with his disturbing depths. He looked genuinely, disproportionately worried. _Why doesn't he want them to even think about this?_

_And why wouldn't he tell me? _

Then an unwelcome thought arose. Exactly how much of his concerns had she been wrong about?

"Clark," she said slowly, "Have I…ever done anything to make you think I might try to take this myself?"

He looked up at her, genuinely startled, and then she saw understanding and pity chase each other over his face. He reached one hand out towards hers where it lay in her lap, and then thought better of it and let it drop.

Instead he leaned down and forward, looking her in the eye. "I could never think that," he said gently. His dark eyes were steady on hers. "Do you think I don't know who's watched over me all this time? Or what it's cost her?"

She dropped her gaze first, to the floor, completely unprepared.

He straightened up. "Lois, it's not mine to tell." He hesitated and then added, carefully, "It…could expose people."

_He's protecting sources. _

_Or something._

A year before she would have pressed him without hesitation, certain he couldn't understand the magnitude of what he was dealing with, certain he would bungle it.

Certain that whatever it was, the world needed Lois Lane to know about it.

She thought of Superman standing in her living room, silently bearing a truth he knew would serve only the devil. And then suddenly, dizzingly, of those addled victims of the music, handing out like candy the most profound of their secrets and their loved ones'.

Had all of them, too, once been sure they could be trusted with the secrets of others?

Lois looked him over there in the half-light. The big blunt-fingered hands spread in front of him, his broad, still shoulders, his dark eyes looking back at her steadily, grave and calm and utterly lucid. It seemed incredible she had once thought him weak.

_And what do I do from here? Badger him? Use being upset to try to blackmail him, since it worked so well in pulling him out this far? Poor Clark, with no balcony to escape off_.

She sighed, thinking of all she had learned over the last year about truth. About how perhaps it was not after all the lean and hungry god she had made it.

About how perhaps truth too was patient.

So all she said was, "Someday, will you tell me?"

He looked up. His eyes searched her face and she felt, in the afterglow light of his half-revelation, strangely exposed. How much more was he able to read there than she had thought? She looked down, a little flustered.

"If I possibly can, yes, I will."

And that would have to be enough.

_He's still liable to get eaten alive._

_And I still have to protect him, if I can. And his super-secret project. When he needs it._

"So, Clark," she said finally, "do you know how to hide your IP address when you're browsing internal sites?"

He blinked. Then he looked at her for a long moment, silently, in gratitude and relief.

Then he said, "You can do that? I always just use the public library."

_The public library? _She rolled her eyes. "Oh, _Clark_. I mean, I'm sorry, I'll stop doing that. But let me show you." She pushed him gently to one side and scooted up to his terminal.

He turned to look at the screen. He folded his arms across his broad chest, and then, belatedly, he chuckled. "It doesn't bother me, you know."

_Yes, and if you've ever fainted in your life, I'm Lex Luthor._

But she just laughed with him. _Time enough for that. For now, computer skills. _


	4. Chapter 4

The first time Superman lost a truly pivotal battle, beyond any hope of recovery, it was with his mother.

He was pacing in the bright little kitchen on the same linoleum floor he had paced as a boy, with the same dent beside the table where he'd dropped the new deep freezer twenty years ago, carelessly carrying it in with one hand.

"What I don't understand is how I didn't see it coming till now, Mom," he said finally. "I don't know what kind of master of disguise I thought I was. Am I really that arrogant?" He looked up and sniffed the air. "And are those oatmeal?"

Facing him across the cabinet, Mom looked up and laughed; she had been trying to stir the dough quietly so as to hear him with her good ear. "Yes, to just that last question. It's mainly this Lois you're worried about?"

Clark looked over at her, her hands at work with quiet purpose spooning out balls of dough from that one small bowl, while her mind ticked off everything that happened around her. He hadn't yet mentioned Lois in the conversation. Always truthful as a boy, even while flagrantly misbehaving, he still found it more difficult to keep secrets from his mother than from the investigative staff of the _Planet._

But he had realized long ago that there could be no mistakes here. The conversation which would end in being asked why it was so important not to tell Lois how he felt, and who he was, must never begin.

So he had been very selective from the start in what he told his parents about her. Everything about her work, very little about their friendship, and nothing at all about her effect on him. He was careful to bring up Perry and Jimmy, and his latest Luthorcorp leads and all his battles, more often than he did his partner.

For all the good it was apparently doing.

"About figuring me out directly?" he replied, carefully casual. "She has the best shot of any of them. But I don't think it would matter _where_ the dam broke, if it came to that. That's not really the problem." He smiled wryly. "Though why _do_ you suppose I picked journalism? Did I understand I would be working with reporters?"

She looked up from the cookie dough and laughed. Since her cataract surgery a few weeks ago, with the milky phosphorescence gone from her right pupil, her gray eyes looked very much the way he remembered them as a boy.

"You know, sweetheart, that was always the first way you planned to save the world. Being figured out _isn't _what you're afraid of?"

He breathed in. It had taken him some time, and been a job driven only by will and habit, to find a way to talk to her about his decision that was true at core, but free of details that could only hurt her.

"It's not why I have to give notice."

She sighed. "And I haven't heard _anything_ yet to help me understand why you keep saying that."

Clark made himself smile and looked back at her. "Oh, don't mind me. Mostly, I keep saying it so I can get used to the sound."

She finished the first sheet of cookies, and then something occurred to her and she slapped her forehead. He watched her start to belatedly turn the oven to preheat, and then suddenly remember he was there and look up at him.

He actually laughed a little. He came around to her side of the cabinet, knelt in front of the oven and pulled it open, and preheated it for her in his own way. She mussed his hair, slid the cookies in, and started the second sheet.

Clark stood and got back to his pacing. "That moment of drama where someone, I don't know, rips my glasses off…that's just the end point. God forgive me if I let it get that far. First come the times when your friends could use your help with the daily things, and you have to let them flounder. Then…" He trailed off and shrugged, tired of the train of thought, well aware she knew where it was going.

"Then it gets," she continued for him, "to where they know you well enough to assume you don't keep big secrets from them, and then it _all _feels like lying. Everything is your lies, and their pain."

He looked back over at her. "That's about right."

"And this line was crossed at 9:10 P.M. two days ago?"

He had called home at that time, to make sure they would be in that weekend.

And, he thought ruefully, had evidently sounded a touch less casual and spontaneous than he intended.

"Sweetheart, for heaven's sake, what _happened_?"

He blinked, unprepared for the question, momentarily at a loss. Both because he couldn't imagine something truthful he could tell her safely, and because the grief and shame were so fresh that even that little cue brought them back washing over him again, almost intensely as they had the first time, two days before.

"Martha?" Dad's voice came from the back bedroom. "I can't find my nail gun."

Their eyes met over the counter.

"I'll take care of it, Mom." Clark turned to head down the hall. She held up a hand to stop him.

"Don't. We have a whole routine worked out. Just hold that thought." She wiped her hands off on the towel and headed out for the bedroom.

Clark sat down at the table and looked at nothing.

The past six months had been full for him of bombs on airliners and riots on the west coast, and the exhausting snail's-pace grind on the unsolved mysteries of the siren music.

He had worked dearly for every scrap of a lead on the mysteries of the speaker crisis, amidst the federal security lockdown that had followed it. He had found that the brain imaging of the recovering victims all showed the same areas of hyperstimulation, the footprints of their madness; he studied their names in the strange language of neuroanatomy, Brocka's and Wernicke's areas and the pineal gland – the homes of speech, and hallucinations.

He had stopped forty-four murders, eighty-three muggings, seven suicides and a light-borne plague. He had been ambushed once with red kryptonite and twice with green, and the second had come close enough to make him use a week's vacation recovering.

He had fought a bleak and marathon week of battle among the slums of Shadyside with a many-suckered leaping creature not made for this world. He was afterward informed that it appeared to have been a larval form, and felt that on the whole he preferred the kryptonite. He had walked through the most secure and sterile research labs in Metropolis, working with brilliant scientific minds on dark mysteries that lingered with him long afterwards.

Jimmy had taken him to six different B monster movies, and he loved them all but sat through King Kong in particular a second time.

Those months had also held the happiest moments of his life.

He had dropped character with Lois the night after the speaker crisis for many reasons, all converging under the light of one desk lamp in the dark bullpen that pivotal, quiet evening.

She was penetrating it already. It had been slipping for months, and his whole cover was at stake. Some new balance had had to be found. And it was getting harder to bear the accumulating weight of thousands of the daily troubles it caused her, large and small. And that halfway point had looked safe – it had seemed that maybe, after all his fears and nightmare scenarios, it was not so rigid a dilemma after all.

And then since that day, his new half-freedom had been sometimes purely intoxicating, full of the unimagined delights and possibilities she had opened for him that night, when she accepted the poor bits of truth he could offer her, and asked for nothing more.

Being able to talk with her plainly, wrestling with that sharp and leonine mind, was unlike anything he had ever done before. They had talked for hours, about the city elections and the underworld coups, and the stunning prevalence of asthma in the children of the roach-infested one-bedrooms of Shadyside. Lois, with a little drawing out - preferably in a back booth in a run-down little bar, where she would invariably find one of her contacts to introduce him to - would dissect the men of Metropolis and of history for him. Her penetration of their lives and fears, similarities and differences, was almost eerie; the minds of the dead and the living were all equal to her; she judged and exonerated them all as if they were the next day's headline.

"You're penalizing him too harshly for not being a visionary, Lois," he would push back, caught up in the moment. From the corner of his eye he was checking on the three different people in the room carrying concealed weapons; none had an apparent inclination to use them, but one was hanging a bit close. "Suffrage in his day was like abolition a century before. The next generation will condemn _us_ for tolerating something that's a fringe issue today."

"Name one fringe issue today as _simple_, as black and white, as those were. Not including the roaches."

"Cigarettes," he replied cheerfully. He had worked her down to two a day and was on schedule to have her off by Christmas.

She looked at him for a long moment, her dark eyes unreadable. Then she rolled her eyes. "Oh, _Clark_," she would say, and then smile at him, so heart-stoppingly beautiful in the dim and smoky light that it took his breath away.

_How can other people function at all_, he had wondered at times, _faced_ _with the piercing joy of being alive, when they're free like this, every moment of every day?_

And then she would change the subject, and launch into a didactic on interviewing hostile sources or marking contacts as unreliable, guided by some unseen master plan of things he needed to know.

Half the time, twenty minutes in, one of the wickedly-armed strangers might slide into the booth and greet Lois with a kiss on the cheek, and turn out to be a contact she had wanted him to meet.

"You're both wrong, by the way," one said cheerfully by way of introduction, as if he had been part of the prior conversation and the last twenty minutes had never passed. "By the end of his life he was retracing his steps on suffrage. But it all started too late for him. You can only ask people to change what they are by so much."

He looked at Clark. "But you, Mr. Kent, are right about the cigarettes. Maybe she'll listen to you. Change _that_, if you can."

The increasing time he spent with Lois was also bringing him face to face him with the odd awkwardly timed distant cry for help. Most of his rescues were too quick and low-profile to make the news, but they would make police reports. He had been concerned, initially, that all the pieces were there if the temptation proved too much for her. "Off to work on the Clark project?" she used to ask him at first, with a carefully level tone. "Never mind, I don't _want_ to know." But later she had started retracting the question as soon as it was out, and then, with visible effort, biting it back altogether.

Then, about the same time that the first child kidnapping case first broke two months before, she had begun to wear down.

Clark had been doing flyover searches of the city for the missing children four nights a week since that day. Lois herself had been grinding along on the case for a month now, longer than she was used to going without a break in a story, and was showing visible signs of wear. She ran on righteous anger and black coffee when on such stories, but two weeks on that corrosive fuel was usually her limit. Longer, and she started to fray.

He had long suspected that that, rather than byline hunger, was the real reason she focused so obsessively on cracking them before that.

So that evening two days ago, to the periodic sound of Lois pounding vengefully on the keyboard in the background, he had been looking over the long-awaited civilian lab analysis of the speaker components, for the twenty-first time since it arrived that morning. It had taken this painfully long, even as Superman, to get clearance to have them analyzed.

The little cellophane-like cone-shaped film did indeed function like a normal speaker diaphragm, bending to sound with a unique degree of curvature for each frequency. A function for which it seemed pointless to be made of a substance utterly unique within materials science.

Entirely independent of deforming properly to transmit sound at multiple frequencies, the little diaphragm lacked the unique single resonant frequency that was the birthright of every object studied by every physicist since Tesla.

It would resonate as a single piece, without bending at all, at _any_ sound frequency.

This was a less helpful insight than he had hoped for, having noted it already the moment he found and crushed the first speaker. The diaphragm had felt, he remembered, like a live thing in his hand, vibrating even lying flat on his palm with every jackhammer or idling engine within earshot.

He pulled the speaker he had kept out of his desk drawer and popped it open to get the diaphragm back out. He fingered it like a photo, by the edges. It was pearly and translucent; looking through it, the spectrum of visible light was subtly and disturbingly altered, straight things slightly curved, separate objects strangely converging.

Except at the one smoky melted mark where Lois, ever empirical, had flamed it with her cigarette lighter.

He leaned back in his chair, cheating a bit to keep his balance. What might be more helpful was an analysis of what it did with frequencies outside the sound range entirely, in the light or even the particle spectra. What on earth would it do with a pulse that had the wavelength of an electron?

He was just beginning to wonder if any in-state laboratories had that capacity. _Or on-planet, anymore, for that matter. _

Then an argument in one of the courtyard apartments six blocks over broke his concentration. He froze and listened till it ended harmlessly enough, with a slamming door.

Then he realized that the sunlight on his paper was orange and angled low across his desk, making the opposite wall glow. He raised his head.

It was almost six. Across the room, Lois was at her desk eating a doughnut for dinner, typing away, hunched over wearily in the atrocious posture she always slipped into when she thought no one was looking.

He dropped the speaker in his pocket. He came up behind her silently and rested his hand on the back of the chair, peering over her shoulder at her latest opus.

_- disappearances which till this fourth one seemed to be standard ransom-motivated kidnappings -_

Without looking back, Lois broke off half her powdered doughnut and handed it back to him over her shoulder. He took it from her fingers, accidentally dropping half the powder on her shirt, and took a bite.

Reflexively, as he had done so many times over the past six months, he scratched her back with his free hand, down between the scapulae, as he read.

- _but which police detectives, since the latest addition of Jason Montano, 7, to the victim list, have been suspicious may be linked by their parents' common affiliation with the University of Metropolis._

"A little down, and to the right," she said absentmindedly. She moved the cursor up to one of the earlier paragraphs. "One 'F' in 'sycophant', or two?"

"Three," he said promptly, obediently moving down over the thoracic ribs. "The third one is silent."

She swatted at him, scattering the powder to the floor, and leaned over even further to hit the spellcheck, rubbing her eyes. When the proper spelling came up on the screen, she put her head down in her hands and laughed.

He looked down at the curve of her back. The trapezii and erectors spinae were in near-spasm, so tight they were pulling the ribs towards convergence as they fanned out from the spine.

Without thinking, as he had done so many times for his mother with her chronic lower back pain – which Lois was headed for, if she didn't start sitting straighter - he started rubbing circles along the deep paraspinals with his thumbs.

A moment later he thought better of it. He dropped his hand and dropped down in the chair facing her at the end of her desk. He pulled the little speaker out and fingered it in his hands on the desk

Lois pushed her chair back a bit and swiveled it to face him. She reached over and took the speaker out of his fingers. "So was there anything new in the lab report, the twenty-_first_ time?"

She was trying not to smile, and failing utterly. Her deadpan always broke down in mid-sentence. Half-laughing, every shadow and contour of her face dear and familiar, she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

He laughed and shook his head. "Lois, I try so hard. But obsessiveness never worksfor me like it does for you."

"That's because you lack _compulsiveness_." Maybe her deadpan wasn't hopeless after all. Then she looked a bit more thoughtful. "Actually, I think you do your best work when you're doing six things at once. Like my sister the other night, correcting all my theology while she was making dinner for three hundred."

He blinked. "Really?"

"Really." She looked over at him fondly. "I was going to get you a Playstation, and I bet it would have gotten you a Pulitzer." Then she smiled wickedly. "But I was afraid you'd give it to Bill, so Luthorcorp wouldn't know you play video games."

He laughed aloud. Sarcasm, now, she could slice iron with. They both sighed, her gazing off at some point on the wall behind the computer screen, him looking out through the window wall, at the soaring glory of the glass skyscrapers reflecting the orange-gold sun.

She looked down at the speaker in her hands. Automatically, as they had each done so many times in the past six months, her hands did the deconstruction, popping open the black cone-shaped casing to expose the little diaphragm sitting inside.

The casing was the other peculiar, and even less satisfying, aspect of the apparatus. Curiously, it was reversed, with its cone narrowing down to a point in front amd the smaller diaphragm cone within it pointing in the other direction. This left a curious, empty little chamber behind the diaphragm itself, with a little shelf sitting in the middle.

On which nothing, in any of the three hundred identical little cases seized in the raid, had ever been found.

She looked up at him, turning it over in her fingers. "What _are _you thinking at this point?"

"About the speakers?" He sighed. "I don't know." He told her about his half-formed thoughts about how the diaphragms would handle other spectra. "We thought they must be strange, and we wondered how they worked. This confirms they're strange, and I still wonder how they worked."

"You sound so underwhelmed."

He sighed. "Not underwhelmed. Just a little chastened." He looked up at her. "How far will we get doing it this way, Lois? Is this chamber really meant to hold anything? Does it have anything to do with why this setup drove people mad? Or, if this diaphragm had another unrelated function, was it doing something else entirely?

"So many phenomena have passed through this city. Some of them had twenty arms with suckers on them. We bring in NASA and Fermilab and the NIH to explain them. No one ever can. At the last minute, we figure out _just_ enough to stop them, or survive them. And then they pass."

He leaned forward. "But I have a theory."

She smiled. "Tell me your theory."

"The thing we never learn to pay attention to, that I have no idea if I'm getting closer to, is this. How do we keep it from happening again?"

The sun winked down behind a skyscraper roof, and her face was half in shadow. He watched her, her eyes studying his face, making the conscious decision not to ask him if this was part of his 'project'.

"And this time," she said softly instead, "that's eating you alive."

Clark sighed. "At six months and counting, it feels more…like being chewed and never swallowed. At the end of the day, the answer depends on how these diaphragms were made."

"Specifically," she continued, "does it lie in the raw materials –"

"- or the process." They looked at each other gravely across the table, in grim unity.

Then he glanced over at her screen and said, "Your case has been riding you hard too. And, unlike mine, it's a _current_ issue."

"Actually," she said after a moment, sounding like her old self again, "it's funny you should mention that. Read to the end."

He reached over and turned the monitor to face him.

_Today, however, according to police detectives, a new and disturbing line of connection appeared. Each of the four children also lived within thirty feet of a location of one of the rare speakers to appear in the suburbs toward the end of the siren crisis six months ago. _

_So rare, in fact, that there were only four of them._

Children kidnapped from, presumably, parents who had been targeted during the crisis.

Two thoughts struck him at once. First, that what these parents had in common had just become his most promising lead.

And, second, that the children were leverage. Which meant, he realized as a knot in his heart suddenly loosened, they should be alive, and in the hands of men with no reason yet to hurt them.

He would do yet another flyover tonight.

"Apparently, though, the parents aren't giving police a thing about being pressured for anything but ransom money. Three guesses why."

He realized it was also the first time she had sounded genuinely alive on that case in weeks.

"You'll make sure Superman knows? I haven't spoken with him much for two months, since that time at your place."

He looked down at her. Other than the timely rescues she tended to require on the job – from three high unstable structures, one hostage situation, and one planned electrocution by lightning rod in the last month alone – he had visited as little as possible while in uniform lately. In part to keep down rumors of a connection between them, and in part because he was increasingly uncomfortable actively playing two separate people to her.

And, in part, because that time at his place that she mentioned had come a bit close to home.

It had been a few days into his post-kryptonite recovery week, when the pounding headache and the crippling weakness were gone, but he still couldn't get his feet off the ground. He would wake, starving, between dreamless sleeps that stopped for no shores of day or night, just long enough to eat ravenously before dropping down into unconsciousness again.

And then came one time when, still in cape and uniform, boiling water for three boxes' worth of pasta, he heard a knock. He crossed the room, pleased that the dizziness was almost gone, and started to unlock.

Just as he turned the knob he realized his deep vision was finally back, when he saw Lois clearly through the solid door on the other side. There was nothing for it now but to open it.

She stared at him.

He stepped back to let her through the doorway. "I think the last flight to Smallville left an hour ago," he said carefully, painfully aware he was on ethical ground which didn't even qualify as shaky.

"It doesn't matter. It wasn't urgent." She stepped in, just over the threshold. She looked at him curiously for a moment more, and then, right on cue, dropped her gaze and started looking around for something else to fix her eyes on. "Is this where you usually come to…rest?"

He closed the door behind her. "This hasn't happened enough yet for me to form a habit. But it's one place."

He felt the sudden spike in the room's humidity and, moved by a dark premonition, turned back to the kitchen. "I'm sorry. One moment." He was still moving stiffly, and was aware of Lois' eyes noting it.

He picked up the pot out of the sink. The water had, in fact, vaporized entirely. From the looks of the glowing scorch marks on the inside of the pan, his heat vision was back in force as well.

"How are you?" she asked softly. She had come up to the other side of the kitchen cabinet, facing him, resting her hands on the bar. "No one does any work since it happened. Everyone's watching the skies." She hesitated. "Me, too."

He looked up into her eyes, forgetting for a moment how it unnerved her. "Flight is the last thing to come back."

He saw her eyebrows rise in understanding, and then, her dark eyes widening with worry.

She reached for the pot, as if to set it on the stove. He caught her wrist between his thumb and forefinger. He tipped the pot forward, so she could see the scorch marks still glowing faintly on the bottom. She blinked.

"Don't worry, Lois," he said gently. "It comes back quickly. There won't be time for a crime spree to start." Then it occurred to him to let go of her wrist.

She looked up and met his eyes for just a moment. "Oh. No, I was just thinking…how did they set that ambush at all?"

"Meaning, how do I keep it from happening again?"

She nodded solemnly.

He ran the water into the pot again and it sizzled up in clouds of steam between them. "Kryptonite," he said mildly, "is a very short-range weapon. The subatomic particles decay before they get more than two meters out. If you make bullets out of it, it explodes in the barrel. If you case them, the casings bounce off just like ordinary bullets. The main thing is keeping my distance from anything made of lead that might be hiding it." He reached over for the salt, and his arm gave him a last twinge of pain.

"And this occurred to you," she said wryly, apparently without thinking, "at which point in the process?"

Then she visibly remembered she was speaking to the last son of Krypton, and looked horrified. "Superman, I'm sorry. That was…"

He tried not to smile and failed. "In my defense, I was…distracted. There were too many people, and too many bullets flying around them. I should have surveyed more carefully first, now that this bait idea is spreading."

She was silent for so long that he looked up and saw her gazing at him, in her own reverie. When she felt his eyes on her, she looked back down at her hands on the counter. "You play a very difficult hand," she said softly.

He smiled a little, shutting off the water. "It has compensations."

Lois looked back up at him. He saw there, with some surprise, a touch of that same look she had worn a different night. When she was saying,_ Clark, he's finished here. I'll take care it._

"Including," she agreed, "grateful citizens to bring you carryout. Give me twenty minutes. Or I'll never be able to look in the mirror again." She turned away with evident relief and paused at the door. "I know you're tired. I'll bring it, and I'll leave. I promise."

She had been good as her word. And afterwards, wolfing down three orders of kung pao chicken as if he hadn't eaten for a week, he had been both touched and unable to shake the sense of having let yet another, not quite tangible, piece of his cover slip away.

Now, standing in the newsroom, looking down at her, he realized she was still waiting for a reply. "Sorry, Lois. My mind wandered. I'll make sure he knows." _Ethically shaky doesn't _begin_ to describe it.._

She nodded and rubbed her eyes. He realized for the first time how tired she looked.

"Clark," she said abruptly after a moment, looking back up, "I want you to come with me tonight. Down to the warehouse district."

"Okay. Why?"

"I want to introduce you to someone."

He blinked. The someones, without exception, were her contacts. They had so far included cops, pawnshop brokers, bartenders, club muscle, federal desk agents, federal field agents, and most shockingly, a copy editor for the _Star._

This would be the third in a week. Sixteen, in the two months since she had begun to take him around. Heaven only knew what fraction that was of the total size of her little empire.

"Clark?" Perry White was in his doorway, the door just cracked with his yellow desk lamp light behind him placing him almost in silhouette. "Can I talk with you a minute, son?"

Clark looked back at her inquiringly.

"Go ahead." She waved him over. "I need to proofread this anyway."

He followed the chief into his office, where his lone desk lamp lit the chaos of papers on his desk. Perry sat back on the one free corner, pushing back several stacks and threatening to start a domino effect that would send something on the other side to the floor.

When he saw the solemn look on his chief's face, Clark stepped back and closed the door behind him. "What's wrong, Perry?"

"I'm not sure, son. I thought I'd see if you could tell me. Sit down."

Clark blinked. He backed up onto the couch and sat.

"Now Clark, is there anything going on with Lois I ought to know about? Any trouble in her family, maybe?"

Lois' family, to his knowledge, consisted of her mother on the east coast and her sister Lucy in Our Lady of Metropolis convent. She spoke with her mother twice a month and with her sister, it now occurred to him, on the rare occasions when she admitted to wanting guidance.

"Not that she's mentioned. Can I ask why?"

"Or maybe in her own life? Big changes, big worries?"

Clark tilted his head. "What did she say when you asked her, Chief?"

Perry chuckled grimly. "I _did_ ask her, your stab at subtlety notwithstanding. She told me her only problem was being harassed by nosy paternalist editors asking too many questions."

"She said that the first time?"

"No," the chief admitted wryly, his eyes sparkling a bit. "The sixth."

"Perry," Clark said softly, "what is this about? She's tired, since the kidnapping case broke. I know it's been hard for her. I don't know what else to say."

The chief sighed and rubbed his eyes. "I don't think I have to tell you about the role of discretion in the office here, son. Am I right?"

Perplexed, and beginning to feel an inexplicable sense of foreboding, Clark nevertheless reflected that the jury was still out on the ultimate quality of his discretion. "No, sir. This is already more than I'd feel right repeating."

Perry looked at him for a long moment, and then nodded. He got up and went around the desk, and sat back on his leather swivel chair with a creak, as if this were not a corner-of-the-desk type of subject.

He sat for a moment, looking down at the one bare spot in front of him, perfectly still. Clark had the disturbing sense that his chief was composing not a sentence but a paragraph, in classic journalistic order.

"Lois' peculiar genius is _not_, whatever a few jealous half-wits and spurned suitors say, just being persistent and frightening as hell."

_Spurned suitors?_ Clark suddenly found his visual recall going off through the faces of the male Planet employees with a mind of its own. _Not…Bill?_ He mentally slapped himself and refocused.

"Her gift and…her calling…is feeling out patterns from very minimal clues," Perry went on. "Now, she's a journalist, rather than a psychic, because she has the discipline to test them, and to drop them again when they don't fit the facts. But she's the _best_ young journalist I've ever had because – that is, no slight on you at all, son, I know you know –"

"No, sir," Clark said softly. "She is. It's God's truth."

"That's right." Perry paused in his exposition and a little warmth came into his eyes, when he registered the comment. Clark found himself holding back a ghost of a smile, looking at the old warrior on his creaky leather throne, that gray patriarch of the Planet who, like Clark's own parents, had no daughters of his own.

"She's that good, because she feels things…moving together in lockstep, that look to the rest of us like separate beasts. If I could teach that to my other reporters, I would. Hell, if I could harness it myself, I would." He sighed and rubbed his forehead a bit, and Clark wondered irrelevantly how many successive prescriptions he had burned through, reading four decades' worth of copy.

Then he looked up, and his gray eyes held Clark's. "And if I could…" He spread his hands helplessly. "If I could get it back for her…"

Clark felt his sense of foreboding tighten, harder than the knot he had been carrying all these nights of searching for four children under ten. He was gripped by the strange sense there was something here he understood without understanding.

He had read more than half, but certainly not all, of Lois' prolific output. Was there something, at least from within their closeness over the past six months, that he had missed, or half-missed?

"How is it you see," he asked finally, "that it's missing? Sir?"

Perry steepled his fingers and looked down at the desk again. Clark had the peculiar sense he was watching the older man use his own version of deep vision, peeling back one day's article after another in his mind to follow Lois' work through time.

"Well, that's a bit of a pattern in itself, now," he replied. "And when it comes to such things, I'm…well, I'm not Lois. It took me a good while to be sure of it. But Clark, the girl was like…a flash of lightning…"

_A magnificent, dark-eyed girl laughing in a smoky room, who could turn her own deep vision on me if she chose, and leave me no secrets at all._

"She used to make these leaps all the time, son. It used to scare the hell out me, how many different theories she could generate and kill in a day. Her recent stuff…well, her fact checks are as good as ever. She's not _sloppy_. But she's also not cracking these things like eggs any more. You know the police detectives used to come to her for her leads? The ones who could choke their egos down their throats. Not that she made that easy."

_She's been working on this child kidnapping case for a month now._

Perry got up, and Clark, surprised, watched him start to pace the room for the first time he'd ever seen. It was as if a dam had burst. "It's not bad work, son. It's not performance measures that I'm looking at. I _will_ say it's taking her half again as long to generate copy as it used to – I don't remember the last time she went home before I did, and _my_ wife almost leaves me over the _Planet_ every Christmas. But the thing I can't figure out is, what's happening to Lois Lane?"

He turned and went back the other way. "The farthest I can get with it is this. Lois has never worked well with…noise. I've felt that she…heard the turning of the wheels of men's brains and machinations because she kept a silence around her. I think it takes a whole heart, a whole person, to live inside the mystery."

He stopped dead in front of Clark, and turned and pinned him with his eyes. Clark had the sudden sense that the pacing, and the seeming open-ended reflection, had all been working together to disarm him and to bring them face to face in this moment.

"Is there something I need to understand about her heart, Clark?"

Clark blinked, startled that such a thing would have occurred to his chief as possible, wondering what that meant from this man who had apparently watched a parade of suitors failing through the years. And though he knew himself innocent of the question inside the question, he felt, strangely enough, under this peculiar cloud of unfolding half-understanding, as if he were naked and guilty.

Finally he looked Perry in the eye and said, "I'd never knowingly put Lois through anything that would have…this fallout, chief. But it doesn't really matter. There's nothing going on between us."

Perry grunted. Clark had the sense that to add to that would look evasive, and he willed himself to stay silent. But a moment later, as his dim sense of the pattern and its ties to him continued to focus, there was a question he had to ask.

"How long have you been seeing this?"

Perry sighed and sat back on his desk, visibly relaxed, or deflated, whichever it was. He looked back up at Clark. "About six months now."

Clark felt stray fragments of the last few months, snagged silently in his memory till then, break loose and tumble into place together. He watched them form a vague pattern, and more drop in to damningly confirm it, with a sinking dread, like a man watching a car crash below him from his high-rise window. He began to feel sick.

_Oh, no._

He thought of Lois, that night six months ago, looking up at him with habit and trust warring in her eyes. Of that astonishing, utterly unprecedented moment when she chose to support him without questioning him further.

Of all the questions she had bitten back over the months that followed, all the correlations she had left uncharted, and all the pure gifts of wisdom and connections she had made him for his work.

_You can only ask people to change what they are by so much._

About the extraordinary, undeserved lack of bitterness she had shown towards the man who had asked her, every single day for six months, to keep walking with her eyes closed.

He felt a little unsteady. He closed his eyes. "I may be able to help, Chief."

He looked up and saw Perry tilt his head a little. The chief's mouth worked for a moment as if he were going to speak, and then he was silent.

Which was, in the presence of a troubled subject already volunteering information, good interviewing technique.

"There are," Clark said carefully, "some favors, and some extra work she's been doing for about that period. I think, in part, it may be wearing on her more than she admits." He ran a hand through his hair, gripped by the simple certainty that things had to change, not yet at full strength for grappling with the how's and when's. He looked Perry in the eye. "Let me figure out how to shift the weight off her."

And, as his intuition flashed unbidden through each point on the decision tree, through each scenario and its final outcome, he felt compelled to add, "Things might get worse before they get better."

Perry looked at him for a long moment and then, abruptly, he nodded.

Clark was struck by the comparison with Lois' troubled eyes, looking into him that other pivotal night. Perry was not, as he had said, Lois, and he knew it. He had no involuntary compulsion to know _how_ things would improve, or exactly _why_ they would first get worse, if both his staff desired to keep it private. He would sleep fine, this night and all nights to come, if he were only satisfied that she was safe and well.

Clark turned to go.

"Clark."

He turned back. Perry was resting his head on his hands, and he looked for just a moment more deeply uncertain than he had ever seen him.

"Am I really helping her by pushing this issue here, son? I'm interested in the work as a marker of her state." He looked up at him helplessly. "I don't give a damn whether she breaks another case or not ever again, if she were happy."

Touched, despite the chaos of dread gathering shape inside him, Clark nodded at his chief.

"Yes, sir. She isn't happy." He knew it was the truth as he said it. _And when I saw it, I blamed the case._ "She's just…" – the word occurred to him, and it astonished him to be using it in reference to Lois – "subtle about her unhappiness. You saw it better than I, and I'm grateful for that."

Perry looked at him, and nodded slowly. "All right, then."

Clark let himself out and shut the door behind him. Feeling like a man walking to the gallows, he circled around the corner in the darkness which his vision penetrated like daylight, to think for a moment. He leaned back against the wall.

He had not planned to, but he found himself looking at her, as off at her desk in the little pool of lamplight she rubbed her forehead and pushed her hair back out of her face.

With sickening clarity he looked back over the past six months, seeing clearly for the first time how the pieces of her life had slowly swung around like compass needles to restructure themselves.

Around him.

Around exploring his thoughts and passions, and getting to know him as if for the first time. Around teaching him her tricks, and introducing him to her sources. Around devoting herself fiercely to the help of a man who held a secret between them like a moat, and asked her not to do the one thing that for her was like breathing - unravelling it.

And rarely complaining at all, and never showing him what it was costing her. Only looking a little weary, and having to work longer to write less. _Never mind, Clark, I don't even want to know. Let me just teach you how to do…some other damn thing._

He was so deeply ashamed that for a moment it was hard to breathe. Of his selfishness and of his blindness. Of not realizing that he had never gained a new half-freedom at all by what he had told her - only shifted half his burden over onto her.

And in retrospect, of his smugness. It seemed incredible he had ever thought of her as lacking self-control.

He felt the warm temporary world he had lived in for the past eighteen months, and most sweetly for the last six, that had felt so stable even as its hours remaining ticked away, crumble beneath him with every moment.

And there was further to go tonight before his work was done. He swallowed. _Be a man, Kent_. _Follow it out to the end._

_There's no room in her life right now for another man. _

_No sane man would want the dregs left over from what she gives me, regardless. Was anyone who might have deserved her even spurned already, because of her responsibility to me? _

The surrounding decisions had been made long ago. Whether she ever, ever loved him or not, there was no getting involved with her, or any woman, without telling her the truth, without her understanding the implications it would have for her life. That would be as cheap and shallow a seduction as ever happened in a Shadyside rave with the help of a sedative dissolved in a martini.

And there was no having that conversation while his parents were alive. Especially while someone at Luthorcorp might still have speakers whose music pulled out people's secrets, and plenty of other people knew how to use old-fashioned torture.

_Then Kent, you self-serving hypocrite, how was this supposed to end? Or did you really hope she might wait another twenty years for you, and never ask why?_

He looked back at her, working away writing up someone else's discovery that should have been hers. He felt his anger at himself give way to grief - for her over what was past, for himself over what was coming.

He watched her typing, her breathing, her hunching over and searching the spellcheck, her sweet, mobile face as her eyes tracked over the text. He fixed them all in his mind.

It was time to end it.

He came up behind her in the dark and then sat down in the chair at the end of her desk. She had a search on one of the parent families up in one window.

She looked over at him and smiled before going back to her sentence, and he fixed that bright glory in his mind as well, and felt sick to his stomach.

"Lois, honey, this is no good for you."

She looked back at him, startled.

Not the surprise of confusion, but the deeper shock of intimacy imposed without warning or consent, of having another creature reach out a finger uninvited and touch it to the sore spot on her soul. Her heart began to pound up into the hundreds range.

In the silent half-dark he watched her face. It hardly moved at all, but his exquisitely perceptive senses, focused for once together on a single point, read the things that passed through it as clearly as the written word. He saw her consider responding with incomprehension, to cover it all, and then dismiss the thought, ashamed. He saw the terrible temptation to fight him on it, and felt his own rising terrible half-hope that she would.

Then she sighed and said nothing.

Seeing her fundamental lack of surprise, he thought of all the visits to her contacts, all the accelerated investigation teaching, and the final piece fell into place.

He reached out and swiveled her chair to face him. "But you knew that, didn't you? How many more techniques did you want to be sure I knew? How many people did you have left to introduce me to?"

She closed her eyes and looked like she was struggling for words. She was usually so magnificently articulate. He knew she was aware, as he was, that each word said here would close and open doors, that one is never quite prepared to say a new truth for the first time.

Finally she said simply, "I'm sorry, Clark." She took a deep breath. "I wanted so badly to be able to do this."

_You can only ask people to change what they are by so much._

"I thought I could. And when I realized how hard it was…you had to at least have the tools. I didn't have a timeframe. My planning's not as precise as yours. I just…didn't know what would happen. I'm sorry."

"You have _nothing _to be sorry about. The fault was mine entirely." He was surprised by the self-directed anger in his own voice. More gently, he went on, "Just make me sure I understand. _Is_ this about secrets?"

She turned and looked at him. He saw, beneath the thin film of tears, an intensity that was strangely disturbing, something bottomless and unsuspected that he could not name. "It _includes_ secrets, yes." She gave him a half-smile

Not trying to joke. Asking him to respect her privacy, as she had respected his.

"I don't…completely understand it myself," she finished lamely. Then she turned, ludicrously, back to her computer for a moment, suddenly intent on making final revisions, blinking too fast.

He closed his eyes for a moment. She had, he reflected, perhaps more right not to be pressed for explanations than anyone alive. So instead he said,"You want to hear my theory?"

She looked back at him with a sudden affection that looked utterly genuine. "Of course. Tell me your theory."

"I think you've been pulled by…a good heart into a role you were never made for, that no one should have expected you to take. Serving something you can't see, depending on someone else's judgment."

_And_, it occurred to him, dizzyingly,_ staying blind to what you could easily have figured out by now._

_Not because it's beyond you, but because I asked you not to look._

Her answering look was full of gratitude and surprise, which stung him to the quick.

He took a deep breath. _Finish this. _ "And you should never have been expected to give so much to a guy who, as much as he…" He paused.

_Be a man already, Kent. _ "As much as he worships you, can't promise you anything will change. Ever."

She said nothing.

"I'm so sorry, Lois. I should have realized long ago that this wasn't sustainable."

She closed her eyes. The thin film of tears over them was thickening and wavering, and the surface tension wouldn't hold much longer. And she had, he was certain, no more desire than ever to cry in front of him.

"Clark," she said finally, opening them, "is there still no way…I hate that I'm asking this, but…"

_Oh, God, Kent, get out of here. Do you really think you can refuse her if she asks you now?_

Whatever she saw in his face, she stopped and swallowed hard. "Never mind. God, I'm sorry."

He got up, trembling the way he had for a day after the kryptonite ambush, unable to stand meeting her eyes anymore.

Into the bit of breathing space created by breaking eye contact, he said as steadily as he could, "I'm overdue to check on my parents. I promise, I won't be in tomorrow or Friday. Maybe some of those kids' parents will talk to _you_. After that, I'll…I don't know. I'll figure something out."

He bent down and kissed the top of her dark head. She sat very still.

_Now leave her alone._

Without knowing how, he got as far as the newsroom door.

"Clark."

He turned back. She was mercifully silhouetted in her lamplight.

"I don't want you to think that…I mean, you should know. That it _was_ good for me."

He put the door between them, to get out into the night.

In novels he had read, this was the part where the characters went into merciful shock and went home to sleep for twelve hours. It didn't, so far, seem to apply to the sons of Krypton. He hoped that maybe it did to the daughters of Earth.

He had a flyover search to start.

"Clark?"

He was back in the kitchen, sitting at the wooden table in the chair that bore the scratches of his booster seat. Mom was there in the shadows in the hallway, and he wondered how long she had been watching him.

She sat down opposite him, with the bag of pill bottles in one hand and the pill organizer box in the other. She shook them all out in the table and popped off the first lid. Numbly, he reached over to twist off the others.

"Where were we?" she asked, very gently.

Not quite able to meet her eyes, not quite able to stop himself, he said, "We were talking about pain."

A long moment passed, and his hypersensitive hearing focused ludicrously on the wall clock's second hand ticking, and the whirring of the internal gears that drove it.

"Sweetheart," she said gravely, "There's something I need to explain to you."

Her steady hands paused in their pill sorting and she reached over to lay a hand over his wrist. It was shrunken, the veins exposed by the thinning of the subcutaneous fat bed. He watched the arthritic metacarpal heads grind against each other as she patted his arm and winced.

"You don't understand what pain means for humans, Clark."

He looked up, stung by the injustice of that, stung by its coming from her.

"Do you really believe that, Ma?" he said after a moment. He was surprised by the intensity in his own voice. _Lois standing across the table in the diner, the pistol muzzle at her temple, her brown eyes wide with terror. Lois sitting in the newsroom, blinking back her tears, saying, "Never mind. God, I'm sorry." _"I don't think you can even imagine how much…"

He trailed off, unable to complete the reciprocal injustice. Because, of course, she could imagine very well.

And what had he just given away?

"That's not what I meant, sweet boy," she replied softly, covering his hand with hers. "I know you have a _limitless_ capacity for pain." She gave him a half-smile, and he smelled the first waft of the cookie dough baking, the egg proteins starting to polymerize. "When you were six years old, you cried for a month when one of the guernseys came down with hoof and mouth."

"Emma," he said, automatically, bemused. "With her tongue always flopping out the left side of her mouth."

"But you don't _respond_ to pain the way we do, love." She leaned forward, her gray eyes fixed on him. "If you did, there would be some part of you resenting me and your father every day of our lives."

Her words went through him with another jolt of recognition, the eerie intimacy of being understood all too well. Not the resentment - he could no more resent hiding his identity for her, whatever the fallout, than resent air for his having to breathe it.

But when had it dawned on her, that she and Dad were the hub of the wheel on which all his plans and his silence turned?

_Can I keep any secrets from anyone anymore?_

He looked up at her helplessly and said the only true thing he could. "Ma, I've never felt that way for a moment. I never could."

"I know that, sweetheart. You're incapable of mixing your love with bitterness. You don't protect yourself. You just stand there and take it."

She sighed and ran her hand through her gray hair. "It's different for us. When our love hurts badly enough for long enough, something changes." Her hands made a small, helpless gesture. "We can't help it. Either we start to love less, in self-defense. Or else the love doesn't change, but the joy bleeds out of it, and we can't get it back."

And he thought of Dad, of the man who had taught him how to be a man, now wandering down to the interstate at two in the morning three times in the last week, so that Ma had had to start hiding the house key at night. _And how long till I'm dragging him back kicking and screaming and accusing her of stealing his medicines or his breakfast? Or the tools she had to box up after she caught him showing the Pattons' toddler how to use a nail gun?_ There was nothing to say.

He put his big hand over hers and made a mental note to dementia-proof the barn before he left, so Dad could putter around in there.

And her comments applied to _his_ life under one assumption only. So that he had, really and truly, no secrets from her at all.

He looked out the window at the salt-and-pepper of snow on the black fields, at the purple haze of the bare border trees' branches against the sky.

A quote from one of his journalism professors came back to him, a verdict about two facts that were connected only in appearance. _Another case, people, of 'true, true and unrelated'. _He shook his head to clear it. All of this changed nothing.

"I believe you, Mom. But it's irrelevant. I never expected Lois to…love me, or be attached to me, in any way. I never planned for that. I still don't. I already know I bring her more pain than joy. And the sooner she's able to protect herself -"

"- Yes, I know _your _plan, Clark," Mom cut in.

Something in her voice pulled him back to look at her. He saw there a steeliness he had last seen at the age of sixteen, sneaking home after making elaborate crop circles in the south field all night for Dad to find at harvest. He had opened the porch door without a creak in the dawn half-light, to find her standing there with her arms folded across her chest, saying, _You go tell your father what you did, son. Or I will_.

"I was giving you the justification for _my_ plan. I'll tell it to you. It's very simple."

She got up to get the cookies out before they burned.

On the way to the oven she looked back at him and smiled crisply. He had the disturbing feeling that seventeen generations of Kansas farmwives, bakers of cookies and guardians of all shortsighted children, their own and those born to others, were looking back at him through her eyes.

"Sweet boy," she said gently, "you have that one flaw that brings down all the real heroes. I think you got it from your daddy. _You always think the hardest course is the only one God ever gives you_."

She slid her hands into the potholders and pulled the sheet out and set it on the stove, and the smell exploded a hundredfold in the warm kitchen air. She crossed her arms and looked at him steadily across the room.

"You think no one else has the right to carry any burdens. But in this world everyone still has to. I do, and she does. You try to carry them all, and you'll fall out of the sky. And all you accomplished was denying folks their right to a say in which burdens they bear."

His heart, much more adaptable than his head, was pounding

"And _I_ won't bear seeing you do this because of a possibility you're so afraid of that you won't even name it. And neither would your daddy."

He had the sudden, dizzy thought that maybe his offense against Lois, like against his family, had been telling her not too much, but too little. He felt light, numb, paralyzed, free, wild, joyful, terrified. He hoped she would stop and hoped she would go on.

"You go tell that girl the truth, son. Before it's too late. Or Iwill."

Then the piercing light of her gaze softened a little and she turned back toward the cookies. Her back to him, she added thoughtfully, in an entirely different tone, "It does seem like her writing's been a bit distracted for the last few months. Don't you think?"


	5. Chapter 5

Clark was halfway back to Metropolis. The miles streaked away beneath him, the white-brown blurs of the snowy cornfields and then the many-colored checkerboard of the outlying suburbs.

His mother's words from the day before had backlit all his thoughts since that moment, all that following morning and afternoon, as he restructured the stalls and put up rails round the hayloft. Among the rotten beams and underfoot nails, and the wintry sunlight slanting down among the rafters, he had felt the thick warmth of her words still sinking into the crannies of his own heart, recasting, rearranging it.

He had been strangely at peace, stilling his thoughts and his imagination. He had had the vague conviction that these moments, still drenched in the afterglow awe of the bright space the universe had just opened wide for him, were not yet the time for making decisions. They were the time for letting things sink in.

_And for remodeling barns._

Then, as he dropped altitude, he felt his cell phone vibrate on his back, receiving a voice mail.

The coverage in Smallville was still temperamental at best, and cell phones and pagers on his person tended to receive poorly in general. There was no telling when in the last four days the call had come in.

He wondered for a moment if it was his mother, if he had left something back there yet again.

Careening down low in the drizzle, over the wet rooftops of one of his Metropolis alleyways where the walls and dumpsters cast their dingy shadows, he realized he was looking deep into each building, from pure habit. Looking for little Dawn Summers, Howie Grant, Jason Montano and David Marshall.

He allowed himself just a moment to consider the possibility that the call might be from Lois.

He landed and changed, at speed, in the gray corner of the alley behind one of the bins, listening to the last post-rainfall dripping from the gutters around him. No windows looked down on him from the unbroken factory walls that rose all around. Yet.

_If they really do ever turn this place into lofts, I'm in trouble. _

Then it occurred to him, with mild alarm, that if the present yuppie takeover of the slums of Metropolis continued, in a couple of years he might run out of windowless alleyways altogether. He wondered idly if it would be unethical to use the _Planet_ as a platform to write a piece against gentrification. He could strike a blow for himself and for the low-income tenants it crowded out at the same time.

Of course, if the slums of Metropolis _did_ gentrify and come up to code, there would be a lot less 1940's-vintage, lead-based paint on the walls. Which would help the visibility on all his flyover searches tremendously.

Not until he had buttoned up his last shirt button over his uniform did he let himself check the caller ID.

It was from Lois, on her cell. The time stamp was 9:42 PM last night, almost twenty hours ago.

Clark looked up at the factory walls reaching for the sky around him, at the waning sunlight dazzle through the breaking clouds. He reflected ruefully that yet another of the memorable moments of his life might be about to take place in a dark alleyway. He dialed in to his voicemail.

As the message started, over the typical static that dogged all his cell phone reception, he heard for a moment a methodical wooden pounding in the background, with a deep trembling after each beat, as if it shook the walls. Where was she calling from? A few seconds passed before she spoke, as if she had been listening to it too, distracted.

"Clark, it's me."

The razor edge of tension in her voice made his heart begin to pound. This was no social call.

She laughed raggedly out of the speaker. "These guys are so low-budget, they cut the phones but aren't jamming my signal. Unbelievable."

_Oh, God. Lois._

"Clark, listen, the diaphragms are transmitters. The music's not the point. You have to warn the big guy. The kids, the speakers, it's all about kryptonite. _Tell him it's not just a short-range weapon any more._"

He froze. The gutters kept drizzling; his breath steamed in the chill air.

She laughed bitterly again on the other end. "I think kryptonite ought to be our _default _assumption by now. Tell him to get away."

The banging through the speaker ended with a tinkle, instead, of shattering glass. Men's voices – three, now four distinctly, shouting. Racing footsteps.

A grunt from Lois, as if she were wedging herself through or climbing up something. Then she talked faster, pressured, almost tripping over her words. "The little ones were prototypes. Now there's a big one. They get them from a 'dealer', and I think he's…not…normal. I don't know the range, I don't know how it aims, I don't know where it is, I don't know what they'll do with us."

Involuntarily, he imagined her there, crouched under her desk, one small hand holding the phone, the other gesticulating wildly. He closed his eyes and felt weak.

The footsteps were louder. A man's voice - "Put it down."

A small sound caught in her throat. "Gotta go."

In his mind's eye he saw her lowering the phone to the floor, keeping her hands in plain sight, under a gun muzzle.

Brushing sounds, fingers on her phone casing. The same man's voice again, into the phone now, calm, weirdly casual. "All right, whoever this is. If I see, hear, or imagine the G.M.P.D. trying to follow us, we'll shoot her in the head. If not, she'll go home in two days."

Lois's voice, in the background now - "Is that what you said about Dawn Summers?"

_Lois, for the love of God, _he thought sickly,_ could you _try _to hold it in? _

"And Howie Grant? And Jason Montano?"

"Oh, yeah, them." Then, into the phone, "Okay. The same goes for them, too. Bye now." Click.

He opened his eyes. The message had lasted less than thirty seconds. Very precisely, he closed the connection and tucked the phone back in his pocket. Then he stood there, absolutely still, looking into the darkness.

Clark had discovered very young that he lacked the human panic response, the shunting of blood to the active extremities, the blinding mental blankness and confusion that came with the adrenaline kick. He had long suspected that half of what looked to others like his extraordinary speed was really a lack of ordinary shock.

And so, while his heart pounded with the terror of what things named and nameless they might do to her, while his vision almost literally swam with fury, his mind wove and shuttled among the details of the message, the geography of the city, the implications of the things she said, the questions remaining.

No telling how long he had. No telling if he was vulnerable right now. He would have to work out of uniform, to have a chance of surviving long enough to get to her.

He called her cell phone. It rang, once, then twice. Then he heard it going off two miles away at the G.M.P.D., the Greater Metropolis Police Department. No doubt in an evidence bag.

Over the next twenty minutes, he learned many things. Lois, of course, was missing. So was Jimmy.

Presumably, from the _Planet_ newsroom, in the break-in the night before that he had heard in the background – _while I ate oatmeal cookies. _The phone lines had, in fact, been cut. Fingerprint dust lay heavy on everything now, but there were no prints. And no bullet holes, and no blood, and no leads. The perps had taken her desk contents and her hard drive before torching the bullpen.

_But they're so low-budget,_ he almost heard her saying, as he entered the newsroom from the frosty night through the window, and ducked under the reams of yellow police tape, _that they didn't even stop to look for my backup on the shared server._

He raced through her backed-up files like a man possessed, pursued close behind by the single vision of that lead-lined room that had haunted his every, every nightmare.

Only now it was Lois and Jimmy, tied to a pole in the darkness, and they were supposed to scream for him but they wouldn't, and Lois stared out in wide-eyed terror as a pistol muzzle rested on her temple, but would only say over and over, blinking back tears, "It's not just a short-range weapon any more."

She had last backed up her work several hours before they were taken. Loislike, her notes were cryptic from both brevity and creative spelling. Most were from the days before they had last spoken, leads and half-leads and false leads on the kidnappings.

Her entries from the last hours before the break-in were set apart.

_Summers: access_

_Grant: construction; "things I didn't leave there"_

_Montano: tuning_

_Marshall? _

_no imaging!_

_Sheep from different folds. Wolves too?_

And then, below that, exactly what he did need: the addresses of the internal Luthorcorp websites she and Jimmy had been breaking and entering.

He gave himself sixty seconds to ponder the rest of it, on his way to her apartment.

Did the last names reference the children? Or the parents, paired with terms that looked like tasks?

Imaging – using imaging to aim the transmitter? Or a warning, not to 'image' something? Or the brain imaging - no imaging done on any of the parents, perhaps? Because it would show what? Nothing?

If four sets of young parents were not pawns but accomplices, he thought numbly, he really should go back to Smallville, where he might occasionally read someone correctly.

Sheep, folds, and wolves. Lucy's fingerprints, on Lois' thoughts? Different folds – different groups? Cities? Nations?

He thought back on her message. The music, being a red herring…but how, when during that week it had spread the madness when the victims even hummed it?

Time was up. There would be time enough to ponder soon. He stepped soundlessly into her apartment through the balcony. Under the sweep of his deep vision from the threshold, it was dark, empty, untouched, and noteless.

He briefly considered making his next move from home. But there were too many neighbors who might come investigate when they heard the noise. He took a thirty-second detour there instead, to change out of his uniform and slip it into the jacket with the double lining that he wore on cases where he might be searched. He filled his pockets with candy bars and a water bottle.

He dumped fish food in his tank and set it outside in the hallway, where it would be found before they could starve.

Then he headed to the University of Metropolis campus. He tried one computer cluster building after another, but the first three all had one or two unshaven postdoc students, working haggardly on their dissertations in the bleaching light of their screens.

He debated with himself, as he flashed from one cluster to another, over whether to send Lois and Jimmy a message. If she still had her pager. _If they're still sane, and not humming a seven-note tune to each other. If that's relevant._

And, if they weren't, would they spill out the meaning of his message with their other secrets, and tip his hand?

_But you outdid yourself there, Luthor. Turns out they won't really answer your questions. They'll just keep making their confessions. _

And if they were untouched, and thought no help was coming, what desperate thing might she try?

Finally he found a cluster that was deserted. There in the darkness, in the flat phosphorescent glow of the monitor, he brought up the _Planet _text paging screen and Lois' pager ID.

_I passed your invitation on, _he typed_. He says don't forget his sweet sixteen tonight. Don't worry - it'll go better than mine. Love you both. _

Would she remember the reference, from a year ago?

Of course she would.

Then he brought up three different windows with high-security Luthorcorp internal site logins, and broke into all three of them. For good measure he added a fourth. Making a mental note to ask Lois for forgiveness for taking her training in vain, he did a theatrically shoddy, low-budget job of hiding his IP address.

Then he sat back, alone with his visions of Lois and Jimmy and maybe four children under ten, surrounded by shadows full of dealers who were not normal, and he waited for their move.


	6. Chapter 6

The first time Lois ever thought she really might go mad, it had nothing to do with music.

It had to do with the profound changes the last twenty-four hours had imposed on her sense of reality; the dim chances of living through the _next_ twenty-four hours; and not knowing whether Superman was dead already.

Jimmy was sprawled out asleep on the concrete floor, in the corner of their bare little factory room prison, under the fitful yellow light of the ceiling bulb. Howie and Jason – unharmed, but filthy - were curled up around him in even deeper sleep, flinging an arm or leg out over him from time to time. Lois, sitting upright facing the door, with the chill seeping into her back from the wall and little Dawn snoring against her side, was sleeping no better than she did at home.

Her eyes dropped to the tiny body of the nameless fourth child, lying alone on her back in the middle of the floor, cuffed to a reinforcement pole. _For all the sense that makes_. Her dirty blond hair was matted down over her face, her body very still, except where her chest strained with each gasping, too-big breath. She was white, sweating, and clearly ill.

The little girl had never spoken. Mostly, she slept.

And whoever she was, she wasn't David Marshall.

And then Lois looked back at Jimmy, who, asleep, his pale face still, looked so much like a child himself.

_Oh, Jimmy, what were you thinking, coming back to the Planet at 9 P.M.? Could you possibly have picked up your compulsive workaholism from me? _

She glanced at her watch. It was after eleven, twenty-six hours since they had been taken.

And somewhere Superman was, or wasn't, dead.

_Or mad?_

That last possibility had occurred to her a few hours ago, from the way the weapon had been used on humans. Why it was still such a horror to her, compared with all the _other_ incarnate nightmares that had been hinted about here, she wasn't sure.

_It's still a range weapon. He might detect it long before it's dangerous - there are things about him no one knows, no one understands. Your judgment isn't good just now. Stop speculating._

She looked down at the little pager on her waist. A better heroine, she reflected, would have reassembled the pager into a beacon some time last night. She herself had mainly been pressing the recall button for the last two hours since Clark's page came in.

'_He says don't forget his sweet sixteen tonight.'_ Sweet-hearted macho fools, both of them, when no one knew if a disguise would help at all. But what else had she expected Superman to do? Listen to her?

How effectively _could_ he disguise himself?

'_Don't worry - it'll go better than mine. Love you both.' _She let herself read over that line a couple of times, and then it autocleared. She sighed, feeling too vaguely embarrassed to hit the recall yet again. She leaned her head back against the hard wall.

There in the stillness and the silence, all the unprocessed images of the past four days began to surface, each one invoking another, somehow related by the strange rules of memory. Starting with the looks on Clark's face four nights ago, in her lamplight in the newsroom.

First quiet, grave, gentle, laying down all his fronts for a moment, as he put what they both knew into words. And then - when her control slipped, when she broke for a moment the promise she had made herself six months before, and began to ask him for his secret – she had seen fear in his eyes. And something else, there, that she almost recognized.

She had known at that moment that if she finished asking, he might tell her. And from the look in his eyes, so had he. Holding it back had been the hardest thing she'd ever done.

_And even after these last few days, it's still in the top three._

And then, as he was leaving a few moments later, and turned back to face her when she called him, and clearly thought she couldn't see him in the shadows - the stricken desolation in his eyes, as if he had just opened them on an alien world.

And then the frames shifted to the next day, in three separate little kitchens in the suburbs of Metropolis, to that same look in the eyes of all three sets of parents she had met with. Looking out on a world that the bottom had dropped from, that had become unrecognizable. And for the first time in a lifetime of interviewing strangers who had lost everything, after that evening with Clark, she had some understanding herself of what it felt like.

But she had not presumed at that time to compare her grief with theirs. _For the love of God, he's in Smallville, not captivity. _

And she had had no intention of giving time to hers until the job was done. She had felt and known since that night, wordlessly, that she was not able to meet it head-on as Clark had. He might be built to withstand it, but she wasn't. The important thing was to keep moving. She would have a few days of shock before it sank in, and she would have to use them.

But even while that deep, involuntary chord had sounded in her as she spoke that next day with three sets of parents, she had not entirely lost her instincts. Every one of them was also lying.

Every one of them was hiding something – doubtless the _same_ thing – with their cookie-cutter stories about ransom notes. Clearly their silence was part of the ransom.

But silence about what? And what did it have to do with posting speakers near their homes to drive them mad six months ago?

Wondering if there was anything they might have mentioned, involuntarily, when under the influence of the music, she had widened her search to the neighbors. That was a relief, to deal with only the normal brew of wariness, curiosity and helpfulness that uninvolved sources always gave her. But no one could recall the parents involved babbling about anything.

One, however, had mowed the same patch of lawn for six hours. Another had apparently moved all his furniture out into the street to clean the house.

Behaviors which were, to her dim memories of college psychology, more obsessive-compulsive than confessional. Briefly inspired, she worked her contacts in the three Metropolis hospitals for thoroughly illegal copies of the parents' brain imaging, wondering which neurologic centers had been stimulated in _them_.

All of it was missing. She was grudgingly impressed.

_Clark,_ she would have liked to ask him, _what do you make of this? Tie it together for me. Break out those analytic powers._

And he would have looked up at her from his desk and smiled ruefully, with his dark eyes warm behind the glint of the fluorescents on his coke-bottle glasses, and said, _You're getting eaten alive, too? If I can come up with something, are you ready to try for a month without a smoke?_

On her third of four trips, weary and angry from avoiding her own thoughts and hitting walls in her case, she had grown exasperated and called the bluff on Paul Grant, Howie's father. Divorced, in his fifties, working a dead-end repairs job at the University of Metropolis, his bare apartment had three photos of Howie to brighten it, and nothing else.

"You forgot the bit where you found some toy of his left out on the lawn, Mr. Grant," she had said acidly, and she remembered it now with hot shame. "How about a tricycle? For the Montanos it was a skateboard, and for the Summers it was a scooter. Why do all you seem to think these guys will do _anything_ differently if you cover for them? Whose son will be next because you were silent?"

"Get out," he snarled. "You think having _you_ judge me matters a rat's ass to me now?" Paunchy and broken-down as he was, his answering rage had given him such a blazing intensity even Lois had been taken aback. He had looked in that moment as if he might strike her.

Lois took an involuntary half-step back, even while habit noted coolly that her words had struck not just grief but guilt. And there was something else odd in his eyes that, against all reason, reminded her of Clark's expression, when she had begun to ask him for his secret.

With all those things churning in her head, she left to check in at the _Planet_.

Inching along in rush-hour traffic on the overpass with the sun in her eyes as it dropped over the skyline, she had seen Superman circling over the downtown in the distance. He was flying slowly, on patrol, the orange sunlight glowing through his cape; he overflew the business district and peeled off towards Shadyside.

He often made those highly visible flights around sunset and, for all she knew, continued through the night – he did to claim to sleep, but had conveniently omitted to mention how much. Lois had long suspected he did the evening flyovers largely for their deterrence value. And lately, of course, in the hopes of maybe _this_ time finding some sign of the missing children.

Unless he was needed, she had never seen him land.

Watching him this time, painfully aware of her own isolation, she thought consciously for the first time of his. Always looking out over the city from the skies or a rooftop, watching the lives of the people below. Always handing someone beloved by someone else out of danger, and then back into the arms they belonged to.

Just how differently from humans was he made? What thoughts crossed behind those alien, holy eyes, which saw through everything and looked on nothing of their own?

_It's dangerous for you, for people to think you would make a good hostage to control me._

Back at the Planet, Paul Grant and his sudden fury had kept cropping up in her mind. She had been drawn to investigate his life a bit, while she sent Jimmy hacking through Luthorcorp internal sites to look for anything he could find about brain imaging.

Paul Grant had been a structural engineer. A grave miscalculation on his part had killed three construction workers and ended his career. A year later, his affair had ended his marriage. He had been seeing Howie on weekends – every weekend - for five years.

_You think having _you _judge me – after my colleagues and my wife have found me worthless – matters a rat's ass to me now?_

Enough load of guilt for anyone. But what exactly he was guilty of now, what he knew and wasn't telling, was anyone's guess. And what it was about this desperate, self-loathing man that reminded her of wise, gentle Clark, she couldn't imagine.

Weary and troubled in the Planet newsroom in that momentary pause, feeling the danger that that thought of Clark would bring others crashing out from the woodwork, Lois had thought for a moment about calling her sister to check up on her.

But Lucy would see through her before five sentences had passed, and make her deal with things she didn't want to face yet. There was one grieving parent yet to be tried before she could afford losing momentum.

Lois told Jimmy to finish and go home already. She was surprised to find herself smiling a bit involuntarily, as she looked at the young photographer with his eager eyes, ready to make it an all-nighter for no particular reason. She headed out again.

She had braced herself, knocking on the door of Abraham Marshall's home in the suburbs, for more of the same. The grief evoking her own grief, the anger welling up from the uneasy conscience of one who betrays a city for the sake of one desperately loved child.

He opened the door and she introduced herself, and he said all the right things back with the right expressions.

But the sense of grim kinship she had shared with the others was utterly absent. She had felt it like a pressure drop before a storm. In his blue eyes, in his artfully simple expressions of loss, there was none of the wordless rawness she knew now from Clark's eyes, and the other parents' eyes, and her own heart.

So when he stepped back politely and said, "Please, Miss Lane, come in and have coffee," with his face full of solemn sincerity, she had hesitated on the threshold.

_What's wrong, Lois? _Clark would have said._ He seems like a decent guy._

_Oh, _Clark._ The guy is obviously full of not grief but…anticipation. The kind of man who would invite me in and then feed me whatever line he's supposed to feed reporters. I should tell him what he can do with his coffee. Shouldn't I?_

She could almost hear him chuckle. _You shouldn't bottle everything up all the time like that, Lois. It's not healthy. No, sweetheart, don't tell him anything. One, you may be in danger already. And two, if he knows you're suspicious, what will his friends do to the children to cover their tracks? You've had a long apprenticeship in keeping secrets now. Keep this one, so you can walk out of here and the kids can still have a chance._

_Okay, Clark. We'll try it your way._

It had been a painful and ludicrous façade, keeping her voice even, jotting down his minor variations on the same old story, trying to radiate total absorption to the perp sitting across from her playing a victim.

And for the moment, taking his hand in both of hers at the end of the interview and mouthing some comforting cliché as she stepped back out, she had succeeded.

_Oh, Clark, be careful out there. Don't trust too easily. You'll get eaten alive._

All the way back to the Planet she had been trembling with disgust. Abraham Marshall hadn't lost his son. Oh, little David Marshall was real enough – he lived across town in a one-bedroom with his mother, and went to kindergarten. But wherever he was, his father wasn't worried. The boy was no doubt hidden somewhere till the purpose had been served. Because his father was a moll.

_And his mom might want to start supervising their visitations. If she's not in on it._

But a moll for who?

Back at the _Planet,_ she found that Jimmy had done a reasonable job of exploring the Luthorcorp internal websites. For all the good it had done them, which was none.

Three grieving sets of parents who knew more than they said, and one man pretending to grieve.

_Clark, how many I's in 'hypocrisy'?_

She had sighed and sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes, irritated with herself. Enough of pretending that two days ago everything had been perfect between them. The tension building to unsustainable levels over the past few months, compared with the hopeless sense of loss now; which was better?

And with the half-guilty feeling she had had as a child when she scratched mosquito bites, Lois had closed her eyes for a moment and let herself think about that tension, about the night two months before when she had finally admitted to herself that something had to give.

She and Clark had been coming back from proving to themselves, with flashlights in a locked office in a most illegal manner, that Mayor DeSanto was not in fact in the Micelli family's pocket.

They had been shaking off the loss of their pet theory all the trip back to his apartment, where his fish were apparently in urgent need of feeding. Their framework would require drastic revision. Possibly a public – no, said Lois, but maybe a private – apology. But by the time they were back at his building they had thought of three other leads to chase down in the morning, and her stomach was starting to grumble.

In the bright hallway Clark turned the knob and turned around again, backing the door open. As usual, he reached out and took hold of her elbow, lightly, and pulled her inside. "Come on. You can catch the last half of your _Law and Order._"

Lois checked her watch. Only 9:30. There was the whole second episode still to come - time enough for delivery. She followed him in and picked up his takeout menus off the side table, as he flipped on the living room light and went into the kitchen.

She had dropped down on the couch, driving the cigarette lighter in her inside skirt pocket into her hip. She winced and shifted, rubbing the offended spot. It was a terrible place to carry a lighter, but the ones in her jacket pocket had an uncanny way of disappearing whenever Clark was around. It had been eight days since her last cigarette, but she still felt naked without the lighter.

"Soda, or decaf?" he called out from behind the refrigerator door.

She looked back at him, his head buried in the fridge, silhouetted by the light inside it. "Regular, black, no sugar. Good try, though."

He poked his head up over the fridge door, wide-eyed, the inside light glinting off his glasses. "Lois, it's 9:30."

She had looked up at him across the living room and tried unsuccessfully not to smile, at that shocked farmboy look he could turn on like a faucet. God help her, if he ever figured out how hard it was to refuse him anything when he pulled it out.

"Go easy on me, Clark. One vice at a time." He laughed and dove back into the fridge. She looked back down over the takeout menus. "Chinese or pizza?"

"Either one. Kung pao chicken or pepperoni."

She laughed. Thirty meals at least, and his order had never varied. She wondered how many hundred times in his childhood he had made his poor parents read him the same bedtime story. "They make _other_ dishes too, you know."

He poked his head up again and looked at her, with sincerity shining in his eyes. "Yes, why is that, do you think?"

Lois laughed. She made the phone order and flipped on his television, while he dug out the regular coffee and started brewing, having apparently decided to sacrifice the battle for the sake of the war.

But as she flipped down towards the network stations, she had to pass his special-order Monster Channel. And there, in all their campy glory, were the opening credits of _Mothra._

Lois had closed her eyes in despair. She fought a brief but heroic internal battle, but finally decided she couldn't look in the mirror in the morning if she denied him the chance to see a giant caterpillar god rescue island natives from modern capitalism.

Clark dropped down beside her, making the couch springs squeal. She always forgot how big he was. He put up an honest fight for her _Law and Order_, but she saw the gleam in his eyes at the mention of _Mothra_ and held firm.

But he was oddly silent for most of it. By thirty minutes in, as they dug into the delivery food, he apparently had other things on his mind.

"Lois," he said abruptly, raising his head, while Mothra was hatching, "why are you at the _Planet_? Instead of out marching on Congress about something?"

She looked over at him. Another oddly insightful Clark non sequitur. "Or maybe in a Greenpeace dinghy somewhere, standing between a whaling boat and a humpback? Is that what you mean?"

He had looked up from his food for just a moment and met her eyes, and they smiled.

"That's a long story," she said after a moment. "You don't want to wait till after Mothra saves the day?" She clapped her hand over her mouth. "I meant, till we find out what happens. Because it's not as if this were a forty-year-old movie."

"But Lois," he had said, lifting his eyebrows, "who knows what else could happen, before the movie ends?"

She dismissed the urge to ask if that meant he was going to charge off on another secret Clark mission halfway through.

He ran the volume partly down. Lois turned to face him and folded up cross-legged, sitting back against the armrest, and pondered for a moment.

He had put his finger on a train of thought she hadn't relived in years, and she was startled, for a moment, to remember how wholeheartedly she had once been headed in exactly that direction. _When did that all become part of my past?_

"So it was close," he had said softly, as if reading her mind.

She laughed a little and nodded. "Activism was the _first_ way I planned to save the world. Although the environment was never the draw for me. It could have been land mines, or campaign reform."

"It was so hard to choose?"

She had smiled, thinking about the friendly cacophony of causes at the organizing meetings, like a rowdy family around a dinner table. That part had been good. "Back then, when I was trying to figure out what was worth fighting for, all these campus organizations were sub-divisions of the Activism Club."

He blinked.

"So there it was, this general, all-purpose club devoted to activism. _Any _activism. Just so long as you were an activist." She steepled her fingers, feeling the familiar touch of each of the mindsets she'd struggled through chase each other, like the seasons, across her mind. "When the glow of that wore off, I started to see…other things in the mix."

She sighed and rubbed the back of her neck. "I think for all of us, it was only partly a passion. It was also an identity and a community, and a lifestyle. With its own strain of self-righteousness." She paused, remembering slipping slowly into disappointment and then anger, finding human hypocrisy woven into the fiery rebel movements that were going to change the world. "You know… 'I'm _more_ Vegan than you…'"

He chuckled. Then he glanced guiltily down at his kung pao chicken, and she laughed.

She rubbed her eyes and thought about the other realizations that had been so shattering at the time. Now she felt only a sort of affectionate regret. "But what's worse is this. When it's all for the cause, and the cause is also a club, people get…sloppy. They'll publicize facts from disreputable sources. Or…say, sell so much outrage about sweatshop conditions that the factories leave completely, and people are left jobless."

"Ah," he had said softly, with dawning understanding.

"The problem is that truth never…accommodates itself. Not even to passionate people with their hearts in the right place." Then she did hear the heat coming into her own voice, as the ghosts of her old battles were invoked. "It stays messy, and complex, and precise, and…dangerous. It won't be anyone's lapdog. And if you disrespect it, even with the best intentions, it's a devil's bargain."

Hearing herself waxing poetic, she felt silly the next moment and looked down at her hands. This stuff would make terrible copy.

But he had grown very still, and looked at her with a peculiar intensity. " 'Sir," he quoted softly, "my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side.' "

She looked up, surprised. "That's it. What, you're a closet Lincoln buff?"

He was visibly trying not to smile. "The only man from the entire nineteenth century you approve of? I read everything on him I could find."

She laughed and threw a fortune cookie at him; it hit his chest and shattered. He caught it on the rebound, and turned it over and over in his big hands.

"So, anyway," he prompted.

"Anyway, it frightened me." She sighed. "In part, sure, because I could see myself there too. Grabbing something and running with it, and ignoring the inconvenient details."

Wisely, Clark said nothing.

"So the only thing left that seemed…unambiguously right…was just that. Telling the truth. Laying things out for the court of the people, for them to pass judgment. So that's what I decided to go into." She looked up at him and shrugged. "What about you?"

Clark was silent for a moment, still back in her story. Then he leaned back against the couch backing, arms behind his head. "Well, you have to understand," he had said, with his perfect deadpan, "the whole Smallville area is beef country. There just wasn't much of a Vegan community."

She laughed helplessly. He looked over at her and his sweet smile flashed over his face for a moment. Then he looked more serious and was silent, staring at the mute pictures on the screen, clearly searching for words.

Abruptly he looked back at her. "You know evil in people when you see it, Lois. But…" his eyes twinkled a bit. "…you know it's never been that way for me. All I can see is Shadyside schools scraping by on Shadyside taxes, when under a third of the residents make enough to be taxed. First offenders who finish their sentences and get dumped outside the prison gates, with nowhere but their old…friends to go back to. Single mothers taking the subway home from their third jobs at 2 A.M., when there's one night guard on every four trains. So much of the setup for the final crime is the wrongness of the _system._"

It was the sort of thing he never would have trusted her with six months ago. She loved it. And then she raised one amused eyebrow, thinking of his other personal fixation, and Clark added quickly, laughing, "Lex Luthor _not_ included."

Then he looked grave again. "So the crime looks sporadic, but it isn't. The…episode itself is usually the crack along the fault lines."

"Yes," she agreed softly. "So that's why you're in newspaper, specifically…"

"…where you can do that in-depth four-part series about the cause…" he agreed, nodding.

"…instead of thirty-second sound bites about the episodes," she finished.

He looked up at her in that peculiar, gentle but bottomless way she had first noticed in the newsroom four months before. As if half-doubtful of the wisdom of saying it, he added, "Even stopping the episode doesn't stop the next one."

It was the most direct reference to Superman's work he had made in a long time. And then he blinked again, as if it were somehow the sort of thing he still didn't say to her. Reflecting yet again that her closest friend remained one of the few people she couldn't read, Lois wondered for a moment if he thought the comment smacked of disloyalty. She wanted to say something to reassure him, something about all playing the hands they were dealt.

But then he dropped a forkful of chicken on his shirt. Rolling his eyes, he held up his hands to forestall her, protesting, "That one really was an accident." Lois laughed helplessly as he got up and went into the bedroom to change.

She sat back and ran up the volume again, to catch Mothra's first rampage against a cruise ship.

But when he stepped out, she sensed rather than saw the change in him, perhaps from the change in his footsteps. _ Oh, no._

She turned to look only to confirm it. She had seen it so many times already.

His hand fastening his last shirt button was effortlessly deft and quick. His eyes had undergone a sea change; all the self-deprecating humor was gone, and they were steady, determined, a thousand miles away.

Not to mention that the hard, precise musculature of his arms, never visible in his work suits, was disturbingly obvious in his shirtsleeves.

The first time she had seen this, seen him drop like empty wrappers the hundred little habits and mannerisms she had thought were _him, _she had been astonished almost to the point of fear. Until then, as now, he looked up at her, with a flash of genuine sorrow that came from even deeper, and said, "Lois, please forgive me. I have to go."

And for the hundredth time, she quashed every clamoring instinct in her body, feeling her toes touch the threshold of some mystery deep enough to drown in, and said, "Go on. Go, it's all right. Be careful."

After the door slammed behind him, she had run down the volume again and closed her eyes, and fought off the temptation to go hack into his pager log to see what had summoned him. She was surprised yet again at how uneasy these sudden disappearances made her feel.

Clark had wandered into her heart quietly, below her radar. She doubted he had any idea that he had slowly become the brightest spot in a life of hunting down shadows. It disturbed her to be aware of it herself.

And it made these brief reminders of the other life he had asked her to ignore affect her like feeling the ground beneath her wobble just _slightly_. It was hard to forget it just because it ended.

She was afraid she would never know his secret. And she was afraid that she would. That she would, by some mix of intention and instinct, fail in the one thing he had ever asked of her – to let it be.

And, she had realized, for the first time in her life, she wasn't sure she wanted to know.

There were already depths to him that were bottomless and disturbing enough. This mystery, that could make sweet-hearted Clark so altered he was almost intimidating, loomed all around her silent and just out of sight at times like this. Did she _want_ to lift her eyes from her little world, her cardboard scene on a stage, and see for the first time the eyes of all the host of audience around her?

Of _course_ she knew her work was suffering. But she couldn't pinpoint specific problems. Just as she had always been unable to pinpoint how her hunches came to her.

_Something's going to give._ _One way or another, this won't last. _

How it would break down, which way it would topple, she wasn't sure.

_But I'd better start teaching him to manage on his own, _she had thought at that moment_. Because who knows how long we can do this? Who knows what else could happen, by the time the movie ends?_

Back in the office, her replay of that night had been cut short by the phone ringing. Paul Grant and Abraham Marshall had flooded back into her mind, sparing her going down the rest of that road of memory. She shook her head and reached for the phone.

"Lois Lane_, Daily Planet_."

"Lois?" Lucy. Hearing her sister's voice, some little knot in her had unclenched.

But she was _not_ going to cry during this conversation.

"Lu? How are you? How was the trees project?"

"We put sixty trees in twenty front yards in Shadyside. I like to think they'll block some drive-bys. Lois, what's wrong?"

She sighed. Lucy had her inside of _four_ sentences this time. She was getting better.

"It's all dead ends here. There's no one left to bully. But I did find a moll."

There was a brief silence on the other end. She could almost see Lucy, her knockout beauty softened but not hidden by her nun's habit, lying on her back in her twin bed and curling the phone cord around her toe. She had long ago given up calling a cordless an unnecessary luxury and admitted that she just liked having the cord to play with.

"You have a very strange life, Lois."

"You understood me perfectly."

"I did at that. So what's wrong, _with your friend_?"

The hunches, Lois had known for a long time, were a family trait. She herself had them sporadically, about everyone around her; Lucy had them with terrifying regularity, about her mother and her sister alone. She sighed. "I was trying to avoid that one, Lu."

Another silence. "Lois, I can't believe you said that."

"What? You _always_ think I'm avoiding dealing with something."

Lucy laughed. "I know, honey. I just can't believe you _said_ it."

Lois had laughed a little, and then realized she didn't feel at all like laughing. _Damn. Here it comes._ She looked up, around the darkness of the empty newsroom around her, a ridiculous check when she knew it had been deserted for hours. And then she told Lucy everything.

Except, of course, for Clark's name, which she had kept out from the beginning in deference to his secret; and for the strange way he changed when he was serving it. But everything about their talk the night before, and the bleakness that had settled on her since.

And Lucy had sighed. "He's a Protestant, isn't he?"

Lois sputtered into her coffee. "Lu, I know I may have lost a bit of my edge, but I really don't think that's his dark secret."

Lucy laughed. "Oh, I _like_ Protestants. They're just sheep from another fold. But I could never be one myself. I'm not strong enough. I need a chance for confession at least once a week. Often twice. And everyone who _doesn't_ get that chance longs for it."

Lois, her mind full of kidnapped six-year-olds and Clark, and wolves smiling from their doorways and inviting her to coffee, was in no mood for being pulled into an hour of irrelevant theological intangibles. "Lu, you know I love you and I respect your beliefs, but I don't think everyone –"

"- And you know I respect your right to be a heathen _and _a reporter -" Lucy shot back.

"Agnostic," Lois corrected under her breath, for the hundredth futile time.

" - but I can only give you what I do have, Lois, not what I don't. Slow down a minute. I'm getting there."

A little abashed, Lois fell silent.

"Isn't it funny to you, that when all those victims had their speech centers stimulated, when they could have gone on about anything, every last one of them talked about their sins and secrets? God only knows if that was the perps' original intention at all, or just the thing the victims all turned out to want most."

Lois was silent for a long moment, remembering the victims making their desperate, half-coherent cataloguings of their lives, to anyone who would listen. "All right. I'm listening."

"We long for confession like we long for air. Our sins and our secrets and our wounds, we want to tell them and be heard. And for most people, most of the time, all the world has not one safe place to do it."

Lois had thought for just a moment of the half-dark of the confession box at her confirmation fifteen years ago, fingering her rosary beads. _Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned._ She tried to remember if she had felt safe there.

Finally she sighed. "You think I'm too judgmental to be that place for him. And he's afraid of how I'd react."

It was Lucy's turn to be silent for a long moment. "_I_ don't think you are, in your heart, Lois. But I don't know him. Most people have six reasons for everything they do. Is it possible that _he _thinks that?"

"I don't know," she admitted. Lucy was only infallible when it came to family. "Truly, I don't think it's the _main_ reason." _It could…expose people._ "I mean, I don't think it's something shameful, precisely. But the fear of how I'd take it…that could be…one of six reasons. Or not be."

And then, a little reckless, thinking of all those thresholds she had already crossed, she had finally added aloud, "But whether he is or not, _I'm_ a little afraid of how I'd take it. I'm not even always sure I _want_ to know." She sighed. "That doesn't make much sense, does it, Lu?"

There was a long silence on the other end. Then Lucy said, softly, "Sure it does, honey. I've thought for a long time that it's not just machismo you're afraid of, when it comes to men. There's something else there, too. Something to do with…if you'll forgive the term…intimacy."

_That_ was too outrageously, unbearably much.

"I'm sorry, Lu," she threw back, "but remind me, what do you do for a living again?"

"_I'm_ not threatened by intimacy," Lucy replied, unruffled, sounding faintly amused. "I sampled it extensively from ages sixteen to thirty. I was just _unimpressed_ by it. At the end of the day, I find grace much more impressive. And you know that's not the kind of intimacy I'm talking about. Though clearly I don't know _what_ I'm talking about, because _your_ emotional life is so much more stable and satisfying than mine."

Though she deserved it richly, that stung. "You know," Lois said after a moment, trying to keep her tone light while she got her equilibrium back, "for a nun, you're mean. What no one realizes about us is that I'm the _nice_ one."

There was another pause. "Yes, Lois, you are," Lucy replied softly. "Which is part of why I need to be in here, and you don't. And if you really wanted to spend the rest of your life the way you've spent it till now, being afraid to hear someone's _real_ secrets and, God forbid, tell him yours, we wouldn't be having this conversation." She paused. "Unless you still don't want to have this conversation."

Lois was silent for a long moment, thinking. Then she remembered Lucy was waiting. "Lu, I think at this point we've already _had_ this conversation."

And Lucy, recognizing infallibly the ebb and flow of her sister's thoughts, and sensing that her point had gone home, had said simply, "I love you, Lois. Be safe."

"Love you, too," she said softly, and hung up.

She had known at that moment that she would, in fact, have to deal with it.

But not right away. Lois focused her thoughts on the first and less threatening half of their conversation.

_We long for confession like we long for air._

And then, for some reason, that made her think of Superman.

_The ultimate sheep from another fold, _Lucy would call him_. Our sins and our secrets and our wounds, we want to tell them and be heard. _ Who did he have, to make his own confessions to? Clark?

She wished suddenly she could have told the Man of Steel something, about finally understanding him just a bit. Maybe apologized, for the self-centered focus on her own awkwardness that had kept her from being a real friend to him. Or stood with him in the silence of her balcony and said nothing, just let him land for a few moments between his long flights. Maybe he could bring her news about Clark.

But there was something else there, too, in Lucy's words. The look in Clark's eyes, the same look in Paul Grant's eyes. Lucy had named it - the mutual longing for confession.

_And most of the time, all the world has not one safe place to do it._

Her heart pounding, she had dialed Paul Grant's number. And against all odds, he answered.

_He must not have caller ID, _she thought ruefully.

"Mr. Grant?" she said softly, as gently as she could. "This is Lois Lane, from the _Planet."_

Silence. But he didn't hang up.

"Mr. Grant," she started, and then realized how unprepared she had charged in. _My sister thinks we all want to confess things, and I figured we hit it off pretty well, so…_ She took a deep breath. "I had no right to pass judgment on you this morning at all. I…I do that to people frequently. But…I've never had a son."

Silence. No click.

She picked up a little courage. "I have…ideas of justice that no one can live up to. This was the wrong time to subject you to them."

"Nothing wrong with the ideas," he said softly.

Barely registering, she heard herself saying, in a tone she had never used before, "But from what I've seen, as much as it hurts me to say this, I truly believe these…people will do as they please with the children regardless. Superman does flyovers looking for them all the time, you know." She heard a catch in his breath. "And anything you or I can do, to help him narrow the field, could help Howie…more than…anything else a father might do to protect his son."

Paul Grant was silent again.

_Hold back, Lois, _Clark would have said. _It's in his hands now. We have to respect his decision._ So she waited.

And then, like a rock shattering, he gave her a bitter, broken laugh, as if she had said the final absurdity in the black comedy of his life. "Miss Lane," he said finally, "Superman is the _last _person who can help Howie."

The hair prickled on the back of her neck. "What do you mean?"

And then he told her everything.

About the strange and random compulsions that had seized him when he heard the siren music. About realizing afterwards that he had been affected differently from everyone else. And about the day he learned that it had been intentional, but had gone awry – when Howie disappeared, and strangers came to his home and told him that since the speaker effects were too nonspecific to control him as they'd hoped, they were forced to use cruder means to get his help.

His help in building a very, very large speaker. With strange dimensions and ratios and durability requirements, that no speaker ought to need. To be built with hand tools alone.

And about coming back in to the room for his tools sometimes, in those marathon and nightmare weeks of being taken blindfolded back and forth to work on it, to find objects on the floor that were strange, round, charred and unrecognizable. "Things I hadn't left there."

About overhearing one of the men speaking with the mysterious dealer who provided the diaphragms, whose voice was somehow wrong; and entering the room to find only the other man inside, alone, looking shaken. Not normal.

Feeling again that deeply unsettling sense of the hugeness of the universe – if it held Superman, what other, less benevolent creatures could it hold? – Lois had typed some half-formed thought about other folds and sheep and wolves.

But Grant was still talking. And finally had he told her about the day he had opened a part of the speaker casing he had left closed, and found kryptonite nestled on the little shelf inside.

By then, he was weeping openly. Lois had been too horrified to do the same. _What have you done,_ she wanted to say, but remembered the devastation in his eyes and couldn't.

The pieces came together, horribly, before her eyes. Lois typed her notes on the backup server as he spoke.

Dawn Summers' mother had a research office in the University of Metropolis building where a few fragments of kryptonite were kept for study. How she could have gotten them from there was a technicality. _Summers – access._

Jason Montano's mother was a vocal performance master's student, and had perfect pitch. She had told Grant, on the rare occasions the parents bound by this dark secret spoke to each other, that they had needed her for tuning the diaphragm. Apparently electronic tuners worked no better near it than power tools. _Montano – tuning._

But what was the point of planting a moll? _Marshall - ?_

"When were they going to activate it?"

"I don't know."

"What was its range?"

"I don't know."

"Does it just generate…a field?"

"They talked about aiming it. I don't know. I didn't design it. I didn't understand it."

_No, you just built it. _

_You're being unreasonably hard on him, Lois, _Clark would have said._ What in all his life prepared him to be a hero?_

And then too, too many things had happened at once.

Jimmy came pounding in through the back door, his eyes bright with no doubt a new idea about Luthorcorp internal sites. "Hey, Lois, guess…Oh, sorry, didn't see the phone."

And then the phone went dead.

And shapes moved in front of the frosted glass around the front door, and the locked latch began to jiggle.

And it had occurred to Lois that though she might have fooled Marshall about the state of her investigation that afternoon, an internal hit on Luthorcorp websites from her same office that same day might just have tipped him off. Jimmy tended to forget to cover his tracks when he got excited.

The pounding started.

She met Jimmy's eyes. "Run," she stage-whispered. And then she looked behind him to see a man's silhouette against the back door too.

And in those seconds before the wolves closed in, Lois had thought of the sheep from another fold. Alone against the sky in all his red and blue and his goodness and glory, and now a sitting duck. And she reached for her cell phone.

And now, coming abruptly out of her reverie and finding herself still dirty and cold and tired in their concrete room, with her cigarette lighter still shifting around to poke her, it occurred to her to wonder if she could have made their escape and _then_ called to warn him.

_Probably not._

Then the door opened, screeching on its track. Three – no, five – of the goons were there, with the hallway dark behind them.

Jimmy sat up, blinking.

_Smart of them to bring five. Because if it was just four, of course, you and I and the kids could have taken them._

So_ low-budget._

She set Dawn aside and got up stiffly to stand between the men and the children, vaguely embarrassed to find she was trembling. Jimmy, gently untangling himself from the seas of arms and legs, did the same. The one in front motioned for them to come; she and Jimmy looked at each other, and shrugged.

One of the other men tossed something bright into Jimmy's hands; he caught it, instinctively, and held it up. It was a little key. He looked down at the nameless child.

"Bring her."

Jimmy's eyes met Lois' again. Then he knelt and unlocked the girl, and her cuffs clinked as they hit the floor. The other children were waking, rubbing their eyes, reaching nervously for her and Jimmy. But the little girl - were her gasping breaths getting slower, tiring? – never stirred. After a moment, Jimmy slid his arms under her and picked her up.

They followed them down the hall in silence, with the children clinging on to their clothes; two men led and three brought up the rear.

_Why aren't they blindfolding us this time? _Blindfolds were good. They meant you were expected to survive long enough to be a risk for telling what you saw.

They came out through a huge factory floor, where a few work lights flooded their small areas, little islands of light in the vast darkness. She could see stars through a few narrow windows, stories above their heads. _The Shadyside factory district, maybe? _

_Does crime _ever_ happen anywhere else? Clark, maybe our systemic solution is to burn the district down._

And then they stopped at a side door into a little workroom. A desk lamp lit a work desk piled with design papers, and Abraham Marshall sat there, rubbing his mustache, looking pensively into nowhere.

She wondered if it was still a good time to tell him what he could do with his coffee.

_For the love of God, Lois, _Clark would have said_, can't you try to hold it in, till Superman gets there?_

_He shouldn't 'get here' at all, noble macho fool. But yes, I guess, I can try._

Marshall stood and walked around the desk to the doorway. As she had expected, in those brief steps it was clear he had shed like a snakeskin the character he'd assumed with her before, leaving nothing striking in its place. His blue eyes were very still.

"Miss Lane. And company."

"Mr. Marshall." _Hold it in, like you promised._ "Is this about bait? Do you really need all of us?" She paused and looked at him, looking for guilt, a hesitation, a handle. "Do you still need the children?"

Looking blandly back at her, utterly unfazed, he slid his hands into his pockets. She had the peculiar feeling that he was weary of bothering to gesture with them.

"Regrettably, no, yes, and yes. Though the suggestion is duly noted."

Even there, looking into his eyes, Lois found her thoughts going back to the lack of blindfolds. She had known for a long time, on some level, that villains were often careless with information when their plans hit the point they saw as unstoppable. _Or when they see you as dead already._

She had long refused to consider that that might be why she got herself into those situations in the first place.

Since she hadn't made him angry yet, it was worth a shot.

"What are you really doing, Mr. Marshall?" Her voice was steady, almost to the end, and then she heard it tremble. She was mortified for a moment, and then it occurred to her that it might – why not? – be more effective that way.

He raised his eyebrows.

She kept her eyes on him, feeling like a man scrabbling for a foothold on a slick surface. "I know you want to kill him. I don't know what he ever did to you. Or…how you're going to…" Moved by some unconscious impulse – _was_ she finding a foothold? – she let her voice trail off.

The kids, Jimmy, the goons behind her – all were still and silent.

And now for the kill, the one question that still mattered.

"How does it aim?"

He looked at her and raised his eyebrows just slightly. Another strange, minimalist gesture, as if none of the standard villain reactions were worth the effort.

"Miss Lane," he said mildly, "do you really live in a world where people answer those questions in situations like this?"

_Damn, damn, damn. Too impatient, as always. Sorry, Clark, Superman, I'm sorry. _

And then it came to her, like a gift, like a sister who knew what she needed when Lois herself only knew she was drowning.

_All right, Lucy. Let's try it your way. Let's see if everyone really does long to tell their secrets when it's safe._

"I live in a world," she said levelly, letting the trembling feeling in her throat creep further into her voice, "where I want my last Confession to be coherent." _Hold his eyes and keep your hands at your sides. Look like you see your death coming, and you're holding on to the last thing you have._

_Which is basically accurate. God, I hate this._

"And I want to know, when you turn that thing on in a minute, to murder the greatest hope of our city and our world, if your machine will drive me mad _before_ we all die in the wreckage."

He looked at her for a long moment, and she felt the familiar click of that mutual understanding, across the chasm of fury and fear and dark intention that stood between them, that the perp and the victim can share. He knew she knew there was no leaving this building.

_Wait for it. Wait for it…_

"The 'music' is only for targeting, Miss Lane," he said finally. "Only an object that resonates at the note's frequency receives the transmitted energy at that time."

_Got it._

_Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no._

"We used, if you'll pardon the term, radioactive waste to power the human prototypes. And they were targeted – mostly - to the resonant frequencies of the human pineal gland and the speech centers. That was the music Metropolis heard. Though I admit we were hoping for more…directable, usable conversations. Account numbers, launch codes, et cetera. That was a side project that went poorly."

He barely raised his eyebrows again. Lois, processing the implications of his first sentence, was barely hearing him. "I gather you already know this one is powered with kryptonite. And, of course, it's targeted to him. And so unless your pineal gland has the same resonant frequency as Superman's skull – _and_ you have an allergy to kryptonite – you'll be entirely sane when you die."

_Oh, God. It doesn't matter if he comes in disguise, if no one even knows he's here. He's still a dead man. They just have to turn it on._

"In fact, it's been on for some hours, without any ill effects on us. Or you, I assume."

_Or…leave it on._

"The diaphragms really are…a remarkable product," he said unexpectedly, as if it had just occurred to him. "It's not just energy they can transmit, as you'll see. And it's not just…physical, quantitative distances they can transmit over. Though, for what it's worth, I'm not at all glad that you'll have to see it."

That part made no sense; she was still back in the horror of the implications of his previous words. But he was still watching her, so she focused on being that girl who had spoken to him, who wanted more than anything not to die unforgiven by God. She nodded slowly and wondered if letting herself cry would be totally inappropriate.

Probably not. But she wouldn't give him the satisfaction.

He looked at his goons and inclined his head, and they marched them away again, to God knew what.

_Oh, Superman, Clark, oh God, I'm so sorry._

_And Lucy, too, I'm sorry, for spreading bad theology._

They came, finally, out of the dark hallways into another workroom. It was bigger than the last, lit with bare bulbs from above, with struts angling out from the walls, everything steel and concrete.

And there in black steel in its center, twenty feet long and ten feet high, subtly altered but unmistakable, was the same funnel-in-funnel shape she had last seen in miniature, turning over and over in Clark's big hands. Poor Paul Grant's final project, the speaker made for killing Superman.

On the floor around it, scattered carelessly, were maybe twenty of the charred and round and wrinkled things he had mentioned that he hadn't left there, some as big as her head. Lois was at a loss.

Jimmy muttered something behind her that sounded suspiciously like "eggs".

It occurred to her for the first time that here, in this room, all her investigative toolkit might be less relevant than his encyclopedic knowledge of monster movies.

And then the door closed behind them, with the goons all on the other side. The children seemed to relax. She and Jimmy, looking around the room and back at each other, didn't.

And then the speaker began to hum.

Without thinking, without talking, they pushed the children behind them and backed away. She looked over to one side. "Behind the strut," she said softly, pointing, and he nodded. They backed over there together, behind its dubious protection, pulling the children with them.

Howie, probably the brightest of them, started to cry softly, his little hand with its baby fat clutching Jimmy's finger till his knuckles turned white. _And his guess at what happens now is as good as ours._

The note dropped, and rose, wailing, like an air siren for no war ever fought on earth. Lois wondered if she would be aware of going mad if it happened. Her palms on the strut were damp and she had to keep wiping them on her skirt. The lighter, as always, was digging into her thigh.

And then the pieces of the front of the speaker unfolded like a flower, and the diaphragm came forward from its center - pearly, gleaming, vibrating, reflecting a light that shone from no source in the room.

The wall seen through it on the other side was sickly altered, the straight lines curving wrongly, as if it were reflecting another room entirely – with some dark oblong object sitting in its center, where no object was.

Lois felt strangely nauseous, almost unsure which way was up, as she stared at it. She tore her eyes away and looked back at Jimmy. His face was bloodless; he looked as sick as she felt. She looked back.

_The case is open, _she noted peripherally. _Could I reach the diaphragm?_

And then the oblong thing that wasn't real, reflected in the diaphragm, began to take shape on the floor ten feet in front of them.

Marbled black and brown, cigar-shaped, wrinkled, twenty feet long, somehow organic, solidifying every moment, it was like nothing she had ever seen. _How many I's in…Oh, God, never mind._ Lois heard Jimmy make a choking sound behind her and suddenly wanted desperately not to hear what he thought it looked like.

_It's not just energy they can transmit, as you'll see._

She closed her eyes for a moment and gripped the strut in her sweaty hands to shut out that dizzying diaphragm, to force her thoughts together. Whatever it was, the people who knew didn't want to be there when it finished. It would be fully present in the room in a moment. She only had a moment.

_To do what?_

The lighter was _still_ digging into her thigh.

Lois opened her eyes.

"Jimmy," she got out in a low, steady tone, "keep hold of the kids." She pushed Dawn back against him, gently. She inched out from behind the strut, trying to keep the diaphragm in just the corner of her eye, to keep her balance.

And then she ran for it, around the wavering outlines of the thing on the floor, trying not to imagine what might snatch or snap at her ankle; headlong for the speaker casing.

She stopped short in front of the diaphragm and looked down at the floor, shielding her eyes. It was too bright, too big, too deep – it was the incarnation of that door to another world all around that she had been afraid would open on her for months.

Her sweaty fingers fumbled for the lighter; she almost couldn't get it out, almost dropped it; her thumb slipped on the wheel three times. And just as it occurred to her to wonder if a lighter could work where precision electronics wouldn't, the bright little flame sprang up on its tip.

She leaned forward, opened her eyes and took in that sick bottomless reflection of another world. She saw heights, spires, and things with wings and gleaming eyes.

And they saw her.

Was this the world of the dealer? Or a different one, among how many millions? It occurred to her, irrelevantly, to wonder on what terms the diaphragm had been provided. _What coin do you pay to another world?_

She swallowed. _ If You listen, if You notice, this is for Your sheep from another fold_

And then she reached forward and set light to the diaphragm.

The flame licked up the side; Lois smelled the char before she saw the smoky blackness start to creep around the edges. She just saw an answering churn and turmoil, a chaos of movement, on the other side of the diaphragm, and it occurred to her to be grateful that no sound passed over.

Then, as the flame crept around and the edges blackened and curled, she stopped her staring and turned and ran back.

The alien object was still there in the room, solid, slick, and brooding. It had made it through. She pelted around it and back behind the strut. Then she realized she was sobbing. Then she realized Jimmy was, too.

The speaker casing was closing – _all preprogrammed,_ she thought clinically, as she gasped and hiccuped for breath, as Jimmy clutched her shoulders, saying something incoherent.

And the door was opening behind them. It occurred to her that whatever their captors had expected, from the other side, must not have happened quite as planned.

And the diaphragm, still charring and smoking, would still be visible until the case closed. Still, maybe, salvageable.

Lois swung around and launched herself at the nearest form in the doorway; she hurtled into him, jarring her shoulder, and he stumbled back a step before catching himself on the doorframe. She kicked without aiming, and the side of her foot caught his shin a glancing blow, rattling her leg. He shoved her back with one arm, still reflexively, and she stumbled back three, four steps and barely caught herself, as she heard the speaker casing thud closed behind her.

She froze, her heart pounding, staring at him, no idea in the world what they would do next. Or if her distraction had barely, barely been enough.

Abraham Marshall came up behind him and waved him aside. Lois straightened up, her hair stringy with sweat, hanging down in her face.

She was gasping, her heart pounding in her ears, but maybe it was enough after all. There was no light of understanding in his eyes. And looking at him, for the first time she could remember, she felt no need at all to make a sharp remark.

She was dimly aware that little Jimmy, coming from the side, was trying to get between them; he had set down the girl, but the other three children clung to him like ducklings and he couldn't shake them off, couldn't get them to stay back.

While he was trying, Marshall closed the distance between Lois and himself in three unhurried steps, and smoothly raised his right arm, with a pistol in his hand, to her temple.

Jimmy froze.

Lois closed her eyes.

_Clark, if I'd had the chance - _

The muzzle struck her a dazzling blow on the jaw. She staggered to the side, the shock flashing through her skull, and then the next instant the pain registered – _oh, God, please _– and her legs buckled and she did fall.

Dimly, through the ringing in her ears, she heard Jimmy raging, "You son of a bitch! Are you ever brave enough to beat up girls _without_ a gun?"

_Not a bad approach, Jimmy,_ she thought distantly, trying to figure out which way was up_. But I'm not sure these are the kind of guys who will respect him less for that. It might work better on the Mafia._ She tried to get to her hands and knees, but gravity pulled her the wrong way, and she fell down and hit the floor at an unexpected angle. There was blood in her mouth.

_On second thought, Jimmy, why don't you handle things for a while?_

Nothing was working right; her ears kept ringing and her vision kept blacking in and out; someone dragged her to her feet, and they were moving. As if from far away, she heard a man's voice talking about how they had never expected it to come over still as a chrysalis; she tried to file that away to think of later, but it slipped away from her. And then some time later she was dropped down sitting again.

When they cuffed her to the pole back in their old room, _that_ she felt.

_Don't make them too tight again, _she tried to say, but she couldn't hear herself over the ringing in her ears. _But thanks for doing it in front this time. That's classy. _Then she remembered it had been different guys the last time, a different Shadyside factory. Clark had been there.

She did hear the door slam, and there in the sitting position, her vision cleared a little as the blood went back to her head. She saw Jimmy's face, twisted up wrong, sobbing, tears running down his cheeks, and felt his hands on her shoulders.

"Lois! Lois, please, stay awake, Lois, please! Oh, god, Lois."

She blinked and swallowed the blood in her mouth, and then wished she hadn't.

"Can you see my fingers? How many fingers?"

She tried sincerely to focus, and sluggishly, it happened; his two fingers in front of her face swam around a bit and then grew clear. "Eleven, at least."

He laughed, but it was a sob, too. "Son of bitch, I'll kill him, Lois, I'll kill him, I swear."

_Not in front of the kids_, she meant to say, but she wasn't quite up to it.

Then her head did clear, and she remembered the last half hour and why she had done it.

"Oh, God, Jimmy. Get away from me. Get the kids and get in the corner."

He stared at her, uncomprehending.

"The next time they open the case," – her jaw felt thick, trying to talk – "they'll find the diaphragm. You can't be between me and the door when he comes back."

His face hardened. "I'll stand behind the door. I'll kill him."

The world still swimming in front of her, she focused on his eyes and tried to summon up the look that had always sent him scurrying before. "And who will watch over the children, then?"

He looked back at her, grave, heartbroken. She wasn't sure how long he had been a man and not a boy. She wouldn't mistake him again. But he had to listen.

"Damn it, Jimmy, don't you understand? It's going to be any minute now. He was almost ready to kill me then, over attacking his goon. Do you think he'll care who's in the way, when he figures it out?" Feeling cruel, she turned and pointed her finger at each of the children in turn, as they huddled against the wall, crying silently, staring at the two of them. "Bang. Bang. Bang."

Jimmy swallowed. He choked out, "God, Lois."

He got up, defeated, and went back to the corner and gathered the kids together. She noticed out of the corner of her eye that the nameless child was chained back up again, and she wondered irrelevantly yet again why _she _was cuffed.

Jimmy had moved not a moment too soon, she thought, nauseous, head spinning again, as heavy footsteps came up to the doors again. He made a strangled sound and started up, but she glared him down.

The door opened. She closed her eyes again and wondered if it would hurt much, and if Jimmy would think to cover the children's eyes.

Someone stumbled in, and the door squealed shut and locked behind him.

Lois opened her eyes, and there was Clark, straightening up slowly, leaning on the doorframe for support.

Her jaw was starting to swell, her mouth was full of blood, and her head was throbbing; but Lois reflected dimly, as their eyes met across the room, that she couldn't possibly look as bad as he did.


	7. Chapter 7

Clark straightened slowly, holding on to the doorframe. His face was pale and weary, and a shock of dark hair had fallen down in front of his eyes. His glance darted over the room, surveying each of them in turn.

And then their eyes met. Her heart was sinking to see him there, while something else inside her unclenched and breathed.

"Clark?" she whispered. _How? And why? And how?_

"Clark!" Jimmy yelped. He scrambled up from among the kids to fling himself across the room at her partner, throw his gangly arms around him and slap him wildly on the back. Clark held her eyes over Jimmy's head, which came barely to his shoulder as he folded him in his arms, and gave her a small smile.

Clark's hands were trembling.

"Hey, Jimmy. Hey, Lois," he said softly. Lois felt her ears prick as she heard the strain under the familiar gentleness. What had they done to him, in the three hours since his page?

_And oh, God, what will they do to him still? Clark, why?_

Clark took Jimmy's shoulders and held him out at arms' length, searching his face. "You're all right?" Jimmy nodded, wordlessly.

Lois had the sudden, strange conviction she could read the thought that crossed behind Clark's eyes in that moment as he looked at Jimmy. All the years of leaping into loved ones' arms that this boy-man should have ahead of him; the children of his own that should someday fall asleep in his. Then Clark's gaze returned, over Jimmy's shoulder, to her.

Inexplicably shy of the bruised spot on her jaw, Lois found herself turning her head away at first, looking at him sideways. Then she realized that was ridiculous, and she let herself look him full in the face.

And she watched in his eyes that same kaleidoscopic shift she had seen that night in the newsroom, so long ago. Something massive beyond telling stirred, without motion, in their depths.

"_Lois_," he said softly.

Jimmy and the children watched silently as he came over and knelt in front of her. He brought his head down level with hers. She closed her eyes and felt a rush of dizziness again, and was a bit ashamed to feel hot tears welling up.

_Afraid he'll see your tears as some proof of female helplessness? You know better. _

_Or afraid you'll judge _yourself_ for them?_

_Oh, Lucy, get out of my head._

"What happened?" he whispered, as if he didn't trust himself to speak aloud.

"About my height, blue eyes, blond mustache," Jimmy said levelly from behind him. "In case you get the chance."

Lois, eyes still closed, was suddenly laughing despite herself, at his sweet underdog machismo. It sounded so, so disturbingly familiar.

_All right, Lucy, I get it already._

Then she felt Clark's palms on her cheeks, back well behind the tender spot, his long fingers cradling her head. She felt his forehead press against hers, and his breath on her face. She tried to reach up and cover his hands with hers, but the chains clinked and weighed them down.

"Lois," he whispered, so softly she had to strain to hear him, "Anywhere else? Anything else?"

Mutely, she shook her head within the circle of his hands. "I gave as good as I got," she got out, over the lump in her throat.

"Of course you did, soldier," he said softly. "But I get to take the next one, and the ones after that. Okay?"

"Clark," she heard herself whisper back. "What did they do to you?"

He shook his head slightly against hers, his voice barely audible. "Not here, not now. I'm all right."

Lois opened her eyes. Visibly mindful of the four pairs of eyes staring at them, Clark dropped his hands to his sides, leaned back on his heels, and said, "Hi."

Looking into his dark eyes, she half-laughed. "Hi."

But his face was so pale. What was it they'd done to him, that couldn't be mentioned with six-year-olds listening?

"Oh, Clark, for the love of God, why are you here?"

He gave her a grave smile, and sat back on the floor. He shifted his gaze to include Jimmy as he came up beside them. "I did a low-budget job of hiding my tracks."

Lois leaned her forehead against on the pole, closed her eyes for just a moment, and laughed ruefully. Jimmy looked with some bafflement back and forth between them.

"He set himself up, Jimmy," she explained without looking at him. She seemed to do better if she didn't move her eyes much. "Now maybe he'll tell us why."

Clark ran one hand through his black hair. "There was no other way we could find you." He looked up at the ceiling and smiled wryly. "There's a lot of lead on these walls."

The quiet, matter-of-fact way he said it almost broke her heart. She felt a flash of anger at the Man of Steel for having asked it of him.

Although it had probably, come to think of it, been Clark's idea.

Then belatedly, something in his tone, in the way he was acting, registered with her. Lois looked up at him, at the dark steady eyes behind his glasses, like a young soldier already a veteran. Pale and weary he was, but something else was different.

Then it hit her. The profound, quiet confidence she had seen first in his writing long ago, then in his words and thoughts, now shone unflickering from his every move. He was being himself.

_So this is what it takes to pull you out. Exhaustion, and disaster. And maybe torture. Oh, _Clark.Then she wondered if he realized that Jimmy would notice.

And then she wondered how much Jimmy had seen and accepted, long ago, easily, without _needing_ a reason.

Then one of the children hiccuped.

Clark looked to the corner and over the small figures huddled there, watching him with wary, solemn little eyes. Lois watched him breathe out, silently, slowly, and realized what a knot he too had been carrying in his heart for months.

"Lois, Jimmy," he said gently, "are these friends of yours?"

Jimmy, bemused, still with tear tracks glimmering on his cheeks, turned around and knelt at Clark's side. "Come on, guys. It's okay. This is my friend with all the fish."

Clark turned, still on his knees, and dug around in his jacket pocket. He produced, of all things, three candy bars, and unwrapped them as the children sidled up to him. She watched his deft fingers on the wrappers; his hands were still trembling slightly. He broke the bars in half, and handed the pieces into three pairs of grubby outstretched hands.

Then he looked down at the little girl chained to the pole, and came up and knelt over her. She was still pulling in the shuddering, too-big breaths; they had become part of the background. She was still sweating, her hair a matted tangle over her face and neck.

With one finger, he made a part in the hair over her face. He brushed back first one side, then the other. He looked down at her little features, as if trying to read something there.

"She's been like this since we got here," Jimmy filled in, coming up beside him, with the old puzzlement in his voice. "We don't know whose she is. She'll wake up to drink, but we can't get her to eat. She's so hot, we didn't want to cover her. As far as the handcuffs…" He threw up his hands. "Whatever she did to them, I hope it hurt."

Clark looked around the room, and she could see him noting the absence of water. And would any more be coming, now? Then he looked back up at Jimmy. "After we get out, some time, she'll tell us."

Then he looked at Lois, in an unspoken question.

She smiled grimly. "David Marshall's father was a mole."

Clark raised his eyebrows. Jimmy opened his mouth to say something about what else David Marshall's father was, but Lois shook her head. Time enough for that later. The kids had learned enough new language from him already.

Clark stood. He had a little of his color back. "All right," he said briskly. "Can you two tell me why the transmitter went out a few minutes ago? And when they'll restart it?"

Lois and Jimmy glanced sidelong at each other. Then, to her amazement, she saw the beginning of a wicked gallows smile on his face, and realized she was smiling back at him.

"Lois torched the diaphragm," Jimmy said offhandedly. Then in a rush, before she could stop him, he added, "And then she beat the shit out of a guy." He looked at her a bit defiantly and then glanced back over his shoulder. "Sorry, kids."

They looked up from their candy bars. There was chocolate all over their faces. Lois rolled her eyes.

Then, belatedly, she thought, _Clark knew it was down. Superman must be close._

_Close, but alive? Sane? _She glanced back over at Clark.

And he was already looking at her, in utter, shameless delight. For a long moment he stared at her without saying anything.

"Lois Lane," he said softly, his eyes twinkling, "you're magnificent. We'll be home for breakfast."

Her heart leapt. "Is he here? Is he…all right?"

He hesitated for a moment. "He's here. But he took some damage. He just needs a little time, to get his…powers back."

_What isn't he saying? _

_Did Superman go mad, after all?_

"How much time, Clark?" Jimmy asked softly.

Clark grew very still. He tilted his head. "Why?"

"It's all right, Jimmy," Lois said quickly. "They might not look at the casing for hours." She thought guiltily of how rough she had been, trying to scare him away.

Jimmy got up and ran his hand through his hair, his gangly body visibly strung with nervous energy. He paced a couple of steps toward the wall, and then turned back and looked at her.

"Maybe not," he agreed, "but it may not matter." He stopped and thrust his hands in his jacket pockets, hugging himself as if he were cold. "Lois," he said softly, "you don't remember the part about the chrysalis at all, do you?"

Lois lifted her head from the pole and met his eyes; the word stirred in her memory. "I didn't. But now you mention it…" She shook her head to clear it. "Clark, a lot's happened, since we saw you last."

She outlined it for him, quickly - the wrinkled round things that littered the floor, the huge diaphragm and the hell on the other side, the brooding lopsided object that had come through to their world. "But if it _was _a chrysalis, I think they were expecting something dif…Clark, what is it?"

For Clark had gone utterly still again. He was looking at Jimmy very gravely.

"Jimmy," he said slowly, levelly, as he stood, "did they mention anything about previous attempts?"

Jimmy pressed his lips together, his eyes distant, thinking. "I don't think so. Why?"

_Because,_ she thought, with a sinking feeling, _six months ago, Superman fought a thing he called a larval form, a creature never meant for this world._

As if he could read her mind, as if to himself, Clark murmured, "That battle almost went…badly."

_If he has to hear about all of Superman's battles, blow by blow, no wonder he's always so tired afterwards._

Jimmy blinked. "You think it's the same type of creature he fought before, back…"

"…just after the diaphragms first appeared," Clark finished. "At the time, other than destroying things, it wasn't clear what it wanted." He looked down at the floor, pensive. "I wonder now if it might have been a scout."

Her head throbbing, her bones aching, Lois thought, _It's almost enough to publish. Though fact-checking this one is going to be hell. _ She closed her eyes again for just a moment.

The next thing she knew, she felt Clark's grip on her arm, holding her up, and down turned out to be the wrong direction again. Without letting go of her, he dropped down beside her, shoulder to shoulder, and took her weight that way.

Feeling nauseous and ridiculous, Lois was in no mood to argue. "So this one," she started up from her slight leaning angle, as if nothing had happened, "did they expect it to come through in the same form? Why didn't it?"

Then she sighed. "And just so someone's said it," - she glanced back at the children and dropped her voice - "are we all agreed it was supposed to E-A…no, too easy…D-E-V-O-U-R us?"

Jimmy laughed bitterly. "I've been thinking about that for a few minutes now. It might be that. But it also looked like the eggs hadn't made it through too well alone."

When she saw sidelong the look of faint disgust on Clark's face, Lois, looking back and forth between him and Jimmy, asked, "Is this another Monster Channel thing?"

Jimmy swallowed, his Adam's apple spasming just under the skin. Clark looked over at her. "It's also a Nature Channel thing. Do you remember… you know, Lois, this doesn't really change anything. Are you sure you want to hear it now?"

She rolled her eyes at him, and then wished she hadn't. "What, because I don't know where up is?"

"No. Because if you throw up, after the candy bars run out, you'll be that much hungrier."

She smiled queasily. "I don't think there's much in there now, Clark. What is it?"

He ran his hand through his hair. "Do you remember the parasitic wasps?"

_Oh, God. No one who sees the parasitic wasps forgets them. _

It occurred to her he might have been right about throwing up after all.Despondent, knowing what his answer would be, she said, "The ones that lay their eggs in living hosts?"

Jimmy nodded. He looked like he might throw up before she did. But it was going to be a tight race. "I think they were expecting an adult. Maybe the…invaders decided a chrysalis would travel better. But from the sounds it was making when they dragged us out...well…" He raised his hands helplessly. "So about Superman…I just think the quicker the better."

Clark had grown very still beside her. Lois realized his hands had stopped shaking. "Okay. Change of plans. Jimmy, could you…sit with Lois for a minute?"

She looked up at him indignantly for a moment, and then nearly toppled when he tried to get up. Maybe that wasn't a bad idea either. Jimmy scooted in beside her; his shoulder was wiry where Clark's had been hard and broad.

Clark went over to the door, grasped hold of the industrial handle, set his feet, and pulled with all his might.

It was two-inch-thick steel and barely shifted in its track. She and Jimmy traded baffled glances.

Clark shifted his position around, to throw his weight forward parallel to its tracks. Nothing. He braced his feet against the doorframe and tried again. He let out his breath explosively.

He took a few steps back for a running start, and threw himself shoulder-first into the door. He made it rattle and bounced back a foot or so himself, but it didn't even dent. Of course.

He tried twice more, until Lois couldn't watch any more. Softly, she said, "Clark."

He turned, panting a bit, his glasses slightly askew. Meeting her eyes, he gave her a wry little smile. Then he leaned back against the door and his gaze traveled up around the room, scanning the blank windowless walls, the corners where the concrete slabs met.

She watched him, remembering their frustration when she and Jimmy had done the same. Did he think they expected him – did he expect himself – to come up with a magical solution?

"Clark," she said again, gently, "We looked for hours. I think there's no way out _to _find."

And then he sighed and looked down at them. Very quietly, he said, "No. I don't doubt you. I was just also wondering about the easiest way _in._"

Jimmy looked up nervously - as though he had been prepared for death, but not from that angle.

Clark shook his head. "Don't worry, you two. The power comes back quickly. And whatever is back, when it comes to it, will be enough."

He came over and laid one big hand on Jimmy's shoulder. "Tag me in," he said with a half-smile.

Jimmy half-smiled back and gave him his place at Lois' side and scooted round, and they sat there all facing each other. Lois swallowed hard and looked back over her shoulder at the children.

It occurred to her, irrelevantly, that they had never since she first saw them asked to be entertained. If they lived, how different would they be from other children still, for the rest of their days?

She turned back to Clark and Jimmy. Everything had been said. They sat in the bleak and waiting silence, and Lois wondered what crash or scraping sound, or unanimal hunting call, would break it.

Jimmy ran his hand over his eyes and looked down at the floor. Then he took a deep breath and shook his head, briefly, as if to clear it. Lois thought for a moment that he was struggling to keep himself together, and it nearly broke her heart all over again.

But then he looked back up at her, and in his eyes she saw instead a grave compassion that surprised her yet again. He held her eyes, for a few heartbeats, and then shifted his gaze to Clark.

She had said nothing to him about the past week. But it dawned on her slowly that maybe there were many things Jimmy saw and accepted, simply, without demanding definitions or details. Including things that remained to be said. And the fact that the time to do it might be short.

After a long moment, he said softly, "I'm going to take a nap with the kids while we're waiting. Wake me if…" he trailed off, and gave her a little half-smile and a shrug.

"We'll wake you when he gets here," Lois finished for him. She met his eyes for a moment and gave him a grave, grateful smile. He nodded. Then he got up and went over to the corner, curled up and pulled his jacket up over his ears.

It wasn't his fault he could barely get ten feet away.

The children wandered back towards him. And finally Lois turned her head back to Clark.

There in the lull of that bleak night, she looked in his eyes. And the soul whose well-worn, gentle light had warmed her for so long was looking back at her unblinking, in quiet and familiar glory. He smiled slightly and she smiled back. Absurdly, despite everything, she felt a slow joy welling up in her heart.

For this moment, at least, his self-imposed quarantine was lifted.

"Welcome, Clark Kent," she said gravely. "I was hoping you might come."

And then she couldn't help it, and added, "Though I also _really _wish you weren't here."

"Lois Lane," he replied in grave acknowledgment, "there's no place I would rather be." Then he broke into his smile, and the glory softened without fading, and he reached out and fingered her handcuffs. "But I _am_ a bit upset they think you and a six-year-old are more trouble than I am."

She laughed softly and held them up, clinking, for him to admire. "But still only moderate trouble - it's the long-chain model, see? And this time, the fit's really quite good."

He chuckled; against his shoulder, she felt his chest shaking with it. Then she had to ask. "Clark?"

"Yes?"

"What _did_ they do to…" She trailed off, as he glanced at the corner and then looked back at her solemnly. Was it possible it was _Jimmy_ he didn't want to hear it? So she moved to her other burning question. "Is _he_ mad, now?"

He looked down at her, surprised, then even graver. "I think there was…a little madness. But that was the first thing to come back."

Something inside her unclenched. She sighed. "And then what is it? Strength, then speed, and bulletproofery…" He smiled. "And then heat vision, then the hearing and the x-ray vision…"

"_Deep_ vision," he corrected her, absentmindedly.

She looked up at him. "What?"

He looked at the ground, then back up at her, with a rare flash of his old sheepishness. "Don't you think it sounds better?"

Lois laughed, incredulous. Then she sighed. "And then flight, last of all. The things on the other side of the diaphragm…they did have wings, Clark."

He sighed. "I know. But you can fight a flying creature, without flight, if you have to. You just have to get hold of it once, and then never let go."

She looked back up at him, at his dark eyes behind his coke-bottle glasses, wondering what other things he had seen at the Man of Steel's side. It was strange all over again, to think that with the man whose presence had made her trip on her words and spotlit all her guilts and failings, Clark was utterly at home.

But then, Clark had far less in his soul to be ashamed of than she. Those holy, alien eyes probably found little in him to disappoint them.

"He's very dear to you," she said after a moment. "Isn't he?"

Clark hesitated for a moment. Then he took a deep breath and looked down at her. "He makes you uncomfortable," he replied. "Doesn't he?"

Lois looked down for a moment, thinking. If Clark knew that, it was almost certainly from Superman. Finally she said, "He used to."

He tilted his head. "And now?" There was some catch in his voice, as if her answer were the pivot point in some other faraway conversation.

She looked up at him. It was too late to be too careful, and far too late to keep making bogeymen of things that meant no harm. "Clark, it was never _him_. He just reminded _me_ of everything I'm not. I never meant to…" Then she understood the other reason it mattered so much that he still be sane. "I meant to apologize. I meant to try, if I could, to be a friend to him."

Clark laughed, sounding astonished, like a man who got back a gift long dreamed of with the change from his morning coffee.

Then he sobered. "He'll understand, you know. If you can't. It's not the first time he's had that…effect." _Those eyes that look through everything, and look on nothing of their own. _Then he was silent for a moment. Finally he said, "Did you _ever_ buy your own line, about playing the hand you're dealt?"

She laughed. "I mean, everything that in my _character_ I'm not." She looked up at him. "Patient, accepting, forgiving, humble…." She thought of Perry, that day so long ago in his office.

_Have you maybe bought into someone else's concept of career advancement? _

"God, Clark, when you first came here…how did you ever _stand_ me?"

He laughed, surprised. After a moment he turned to face her, and placed his hands on her shoulders and met her eyes. "Lois Lane," he said solemnly, "you have no idea of what glory I see when I look at you."

Those skulking tears threatened to well up again.

"You are…profoundly, unflinchingly generous. You defend the innocent at any cost. You fight for truth and justice without resting. You're brave beyond words." Then he looked pensive for just a moment, deadpanning. "Beyond all reason, really."

She laughed, with the tears blurring her vision. "And," he added, "you're patient beyond my wildest dreams."

She couldn't help it. "Your wildest dreams are about patience?" She looked up to meet those dancing eyes, and they laughed.

And then he looked momentarily serious again, looking at her steadily. "And you've been my refuge here, since the day you told me to fight you for my bylines."

Her eyes filled up with tears again, remembering. This had not, she reflected ruefully, been a banner day for her self-control. "Then you'll _have_ to accept my apology. For misjudging you so…God, completely. I should have said it long ago…"

He laughed easily. "I _chose_ that, long ago. I never blamed you for a moment." Then he smiled a little. "Which my mother would say makes _me_ equally guilty, of underestimating you."

She laughed and nodded. "And Lord knows, given the choice between guilt and blindness, I'd head straight for the guilt." She looked up at him. "God help us, Clark. Will we get it straight in time to forgive the right things, before it's too late, do you think?"

He laughed.

Then Jimmy shifted in the corner, with the kids piled up on him, and she and Clark both looked over at him. The rise and fall of his chest was deep and regular. "Incredible," she said softly.

"Lois," Clark said after a moment, looking back down at her, "I had some time to think while I was…waiting for the dogs to arrive."

She shivered, thinking of him sitting patiently at a monitor in the dark somewhere, waiting for the doorknob to turn by an unseen hand.

"While pondering the issue of covering my tracks," he said wryly, "I realized two things. I had become…inexcusably sloppy around you, with my…work." He laughed, as if it struck him now as a strange euphemism. "God forgive me. You made it so easy for me. I asked you not to pounce, and then very nearly dangled bait at you.. And that, I know now, was a kind of selfishness."

She started to contradict him, but something in his face stopped her.

"So if you had chosen to search it out, or even to think about it…it was well within your reach for months. I know you were being honorable." He paused. "But I realized tonight," he went on more slowly, as if it were painful for him beyond words, "that you must also have felt that…knowing…would be its own kind of burden."

Lois looked up at him, surprised again at his observantness. And then surprised again still, when she realized that the mention of knowing, after these days of lies and moles and parasites from other worlds, had completely failed to evoke a sense of dread.

After a moment, genuinely curious, she said, "Is it _not_ a burden, for you?"

He looked down at her wryly. "Only sometimes, really. Like in the middle of _Mothra_."

The unaccustomed ease with which he answered the question made her eyes widen. She realized suddenly, for the first time, that he wasn't feeling his way toward some new balance to replace the old. He was preparing, in some way, to overturn it completely.

He must have seen the understanding in her eyes. "It's all right, sw…Lois. That's why I brought it up. You shouldn't _have_ to want to know. I thought once that if _I_ were free to tell you, everything would be perfect. But I realized tonight that that was just another kind of selfishness." He looked down at her. "What you know, you can't unknow. There is no… I don't know, magical kiss of amnesia, to take that weight away."

He turned and took hold of her shoulders, holding her up facing him, and his eyes searched her face. "And Lois, you weren't wrong. It would, in fact, be…heavy. You might come to regret it."

His words touched her like a finger on a pool of water, the contact at a point rippling through the whole. So many things long quiet were coming to a head here, bright and close around them now, like the all-seeing gaze of the Man of Steel.

Which she had made fearsome, when it wasn't. Like so many, many things.

"So you still wouldn't want me to tell Luthorcorp?" she asked him, wide-eyed.

"I'd ask you not to," he agreed gravely. "Or the _Star_."

"Or Satan," they finished, together.

She laughed, and then took a deep breath. "Clark," she said as gently as she could, "_is _it something you're ashamed of? Are you afraid I'll…judge you for it?"

He looked down for just a moment, and then up at her again. "No. It's not. But it might change…quite a lot…about the way you see me. I think you might still want me to leave. And that's all right."

"_I_ didn't want you to leave in the first place," she said mildly.

They both laughed a little, remembering, out of the unforgotten pain.

_It's not just machismo you're afraid of, when it comes to men. There's something else there, too. Something to do with…if you'll forgive the term…intimacy._

_But believe it or not, Lucy, I _can_ be taught._

"So are you free to tell me? Are you giving me the choice?"

Clark swallowed. His steadiness slipped for just a moment; she saw the flash of fear in his eyes again. "Yes," he whispered. Then he got his control back. "Yes. I should have given it to you long ago."

Lois looked at his face, calm, accepting, ready to lose everything again either way; his shoulders, straight and ready for the burdens back.

And he was right, that there was no telling what changes it might make, for her world, and between her and him.

But there was no road that had no burdens. Not for her, or him, or Jimmy in the corner, or the children sleeping fitfully around him. He had lived long enough with the burden of silence. And if knowing threatened the size of her world, or her concept of him, it was still the case that the truth was no one's lapdog.

And she was tired of making good things frightening, and easy things hard.

"Clark," she got out, and winced as her voice cracked again. Then it occurred to her that that was one last, small, harmless thing she had made fearsome, and she laughed helplessly. "We expect the worst so quickly, you and I. Do you think it's possible, at all, that we just need to lighten up?"

He laughed ruefully, his eyes bright with understanding. "Lois, you have got to meet my mother."

She placed her hands on his shoulders, the chain links clinking as they draped across his chest. She looked into those holy eyes, and said, "_Tell me_."

Then the door, which was apparently the easiest way in after all, imploded.


	8. Chapter 8

A/N: This is the action chapter, and far and away the hardest one so far to write. But bear with me; I need the setup. Comments on the flow of the action and the characterization would be tremendous.

The impact was like a canon shot. The steel door doubled over and shrieked out of its floor tracks, as Clark leapt to his feet. It twisted horribly around its last upper corner still lodged in place, hit the ceiling with another clang, and dropped to the floor.

And then, as he braced himself, there was a chitinous scraping, insectile but ponderously heavy, a behemoth scuttling…away.

The doorway was empty.

For a moment, nothing moved, except the door wobbling to a rest on the floor.

Clark started to charge, as the first of the children started to wail.

"Clark!"

He checked himself and looked back at her. She shook her head. "Don't do it. You just _know_ it wants us one at a time."

He smiled ruefully. "If it leaves, and gets airborne, it doesn't need _us_ at all." And then he turned, and his footsteps pounded through the hall out to the factory floor on the other side.

She stared after him a moment with dawning horror, and then scrambled to her feet and yanked at the chain, furiously, futilely. It caught her up short - she couldn't even get in line with the doorway to look down the hall. _Good point, Clark. Except the part where you prevent that, singlehandedly. _

Jimmy was creeping along the walls toward the doorway, listening, bracing himself, as if he thought he could surprise it. _But then, maybe it doesn't know how many of us there are. Maybe he can. _

She caught herself still pulling absurdly at the chain, and dropped it. She felt a childish desire to kick the pole.

The scuttling ended abruptly, in silence.

Then Clark's voice rang out from the factory floor. "Stay back! Away from the door!"

Jimmy flattened himself against the wall and glanced back at them; the children in the corner were all out of the direct line. His eyes and Lois' met for a brief moment. Then he poked his head around the doorway.

And she watched him watching, as the hallway broke into a chaos of sounds – legs, or wings, or something else, slamming, scraping, scrabbling along the floor, hitting the walls with hideous force, rubble tumbling down in the wake. _Oh, God. No human tissue can take that. _

There was a moment of silence, and another series of crashes, more distant. The children howled more intensely with each crash. But something changed in Jimmy's body as he watched.

"Jimmy!" she hissed.

He turned back to her, as the crashes outside ended in silence again, and he mouthed over the wailing, "Superman," before turning back.

Her heart jumped. And then she thought, _but how much of him?_

"What about Clark?"

Without turning, he shook his head. "I don't see him. He's not in the hall."

Silence fell again outside; she heard a man's voice, and for a dizzying moment, she couldn't tell which one of them it was.

"Go back to your home, if you can. You'll find this world defended. We've faced your people before."

Superman.

If it understood, it made no answer she could recognize. More crashing, more scrabbling, and then another silence, as if they had broken apart again.

"Jimmy! How's he doing? Can you see anything?"

He turned back again. "I think it's…a close match, right now. It keeps breaking free, but he keeps catching it." He hesitated. "I still don't see Clark."

_Clark_, Lois almost yelled out into the silence, and then caught herself. No telling if he was hiding. Or trying to circle around behind it silently - to do what, to such a creature? Or…not. _Don't think about that now._ She looked down at the chain in bitter frustration, and swore at it. Under her breath, for the kids' sake.

Jimmy took a deep breath. "I'm going to look for him." Their eyes met for a moment, gravely, and then he slipped out.

"Or maybe you can't go back," came Superman's voice, calm, intense, as if resuming a conversation. "Stand down and stop, and I'll protect you in this world, if I can."

More crashing, on the factory floor, then from beyond one of their side walls. And then there was a final blow that rattled the walls. And then silence.

The kids were wailing unabated. She turned to shush them.

And there behind her, the little girl on the floor was trying to get up on her elbow. Her eyes, fixed on the floor, were open.

Then Jimmy came pounding back into the room, gasping. "They're gone! Through the wall, Lois…they're outside."

She stared back at him, uncomprehending for a moment, while his eyes were drawn past her to the girl. "What about Clark?"

He pulled his eyes back to her and shook his head. "Nowhere. I looked…all over."

_There wasn't time to do anything to a body. Oh, God, please, there wasn't. _

_But can Superman fly?_

The little girl raised her head to look up at both of them for a moment, still drawing in breaths far too big, too fast. Then she dropped it again, exhausted. Lois thought, peripherally, _what a horrible thing to awaken to._

There was another crash from outside, somewhere near. Their eyes searched the walls and ceiling, futilely, for the next sign of what was happening.

And then her eyes and Jimmy's eyes fell on the steel door, lying on the floor, crumpled from the creature's blow. They looked at each other.

Wordlessly he knelt and wrestled it upright; it was heavy and awkward, and he had to walk it over to her on its corners. Lois knelt and stretched the chain out taut between her arms. He wrapped his arms around it, lifted it a foot off the ground, and dropped it on the chain.

The clang made her jump; it started to topple, and he scrambled to keep it upright. He tipped it and they looked underneath.

Not even dented.

_Come on, damn it._ She wrapped the chain around her hands on both sides for a grip, and pulled it taut again. He hoisted the door and slammed it down with his own strength behind it. One of the kids whimpered.

Nothing. It gleamed imperviously at them

"That chain," he said, disgusted, "is not normal."

She gave herself one moment to scream inwardly, and then pulled it together. _Maybe I should be flattered I got it after all._ "Jimmy," she said steadily, "where are all the others?"

He knelt in front of her, one arm bracing the door, and shook his head. "I didn't see anyone. I mean, I didn't look far. But with that thing ready to hatch…and they'd been wrong once already…I wonder if they didn't lose some faith in their dealers."

She smiled grimly.

"Lois," he said after a moment. "I didn't find any…tools."

The little girl coughed aloud. They turned their heads to look. She was sitting up, her arms wrapped around the pole.

"Are you okay, honey?" Lois asked her, absurdly, trying to sound calm. _I'm sorry about all the banging, and the chains, and the thing that wants to lay eggs in you._

The girl looked up and fixed her with a strange, steady intensity, something wordlessly adult on her face. Her lips parted.

And then the far wall thundered and shuddered, and a spiderweb of cracks shot out over the face of the concrete. The children shrieked and pressed against the corner wall.

Jimmy yelled, dropped the door, and ran for them. "Come on! Come here! Come on!" They hid their faces, and he grabbed them by scruffs and arms and pulled them across the room toward the door, into the far corner.

The little girl prudently moved to put the pole between her and the wall.

Another crash, and the wall sagged inwards at the impact, rubble tumbled to the floor, and through a head-sized chink in the concrete they saw night.

Less than an hour had passed since the diaphragm went down. But what rules applied to transmitted kryptonite? Could he fly yet? Could he even take this beating?

_And Clark should have been back by now._

Jimmy was back up with the steel door, trying to lift it up another hopeless time. She opened her mouth to stop him, but when she saw the look on his face, she closed it, knelt and spread her hands again. They were trembling. _Last try, Jimmy. _

The door rang on the concrete. The children's wailing increased in intensity.

"_Damn it!"_ Jimmy howled. He lifted it again, slammed it down, put his weight on it, and rocked it back and forth over the chain.

_Quite a metal_, she thought grudgingly. _Wonder if Luthorcorp manufactures this stuff. Okay, enough._

She looked up at him. "Jimmy." He was twisting the door back and forth over the link, with a horrible grating sound. _"Jimmy."_

He stopped and looked down at her, panting. She shook her head.

He took a breath. He knew what was coming. But he would do it, if she gave him a plan. "You have to go get the G.M.P.D. Now."

"No."

"Yes."

"_No."_

"Jimmy! They'll cut us free. The sooner you get back…"

"Don't patronize me!" he snapped.

She stared at him in surprise. And then with dawning guilt. She sighed. "Okay. I'm sorry. Just go get them. And we'll do our best here."

He looked wild, defeated, heartbroken, furious, panting down at her. "We'll find another way. There must be something here. It's a damn _factory."_

Another blow on the outside wall, higher up. Dust and rubble pattered to the ground. _That thing's no fool. It knows where we are._

She looked back up at him. "Jimmy."

"Lois, stop it –"

"Jimmy, for the love of God, stop with the macho! This isn't _about_ you."

Unwillingly, guiltily, he tore his eyes over to the kids in the corner.

"Take it like a man and go. Those things had eyes - try to stay under cover. You may have to leave the kids somewhere, to go for help. Underground, maybe. If this _is_ Shadyside, try the public housing off Coburn for a phone. And tell the G.M.P.D., when they open fire, we don't know if…he's bulletproof, just now."

She stopped, at the end of her list, her heart pounding under Jimmy's desolate eyes. The deserted Shadyside factories went on for miles, and they both knew it.

"And Jimmy…if you find Clark…"

_If you find Clark, what?_

_Don't give him more than anyone can handle, sweetheart. _

She sighed. "You'll know what to do. You'll know. "

The wall took another blow. Jimmy closed his eyes for a moment. Then he turned and dragged the door to Lois' pole, and leaned it there for support. "Maybe," he said softly, "you can use it as a shield." She nodded.

He bent roughly, clumsily, and kissed her cheek. She smoothed down his cropped hair. Then he broke away, tears shining in his eyes. He hesitated a moment, as if he were searching for words. Then, as if he realized there was no perfect goodbye would make anything all right, he turned away and reached for the kids against the wall.

"Come on, guys. Stay close to me. We're going home. It'll be great. Just stay close – Howie, put your candy bar down and give me your hand. Dawn, you get Howie's other hand. Okay."

He pulled them through the door; he looked back without pausing for a moment and then moved on, and called back over his shoulder, "I'll get them, Lois. They'll be here, in no time."

"I know you will, soldier," she said softly.

Then they were gone.

And Lois turned back to the little girl who had been wordlessly holding the pole, watching everything. She wasn't sure if she meant to comfort her, or question her, or both.

But the child had turned away a moment before, and was watching the cracked far wall intently, as if she knew it was going to –

Implode. The concrete burst inward, dust clouded the air, and then there was a chaos of scrabbling sounds in the room.

Through the dust came a sleet-grey tapering shape, resolving into a mantis head as long as her body, full of mandibles and many-sided eyes, glowing with the milky light of all the eyes across the diaphragm. Out of its tangle of legs beneath its carapace, several lifted, delicately.

As Lois stood frozen, unable to look away, the child got to her feet, holding on to the pole. She stood facing the creature, silent. And it paused in its advance, cocked its head, and regarded her with those hundred-faceted eyes. It chittered at her.

Lois took a deep breath, to yell something to distract it.

And then the child chittered back.

Lois stared at her, incredulous, with that distant but now familiar sense that her paradigms were about to be brutalized yet again.

Then the thing advanced again on the child, its many legs moving up and down like pistonworks. The girl retreated behind her pole, back straight and defiant, chittering still. And then the thing swung its hind section forward beneath it, doubling over, folding impossibly flat. An orifice in its hind tip dilated.

_Where the eggs are. Oh, Jimmy, you were right._

And then Superman was there, from _behind_ them, pounding through the hallway door, cape flashing, slamming into the creature with a sickening smack.

It skidded back halfway through the hole in the wall, and scrabbled for purchase on the broken edges for a moment while he tightened his arms around it. Then the wall crumbled and they fell back into the sky, the creature flailing, the pieces of the wall falling close behind.

And as the dust clouds cleared, with the wall ripped away, she saw the city and the clear cool night beyond it for the first time.

They were eight or so stories up, with the lower factory roofs and smokestacks ranged out below them as far as she could see, puddles slicking every surface under the yellow floodlights. And in the moonlight in the air below them she saw Superman and the creature grappling in deadly, titan silence.

Lois's hands were trembling; her mouth was dry and she knew her breathing was ragged. But she stepped around the pole, twisted awkwardly because of the cuffs, and knelt in front of the little girl. Who was most certainly not normal.

Forcing her voice steady, trying to organize her questions by importance in good pressed-for-time investigative style, she said, "What do you know? How powerful is it?"

The child looked at her gravely. And in those blue eyes, she realized for the first time, there was that same milky luminescence that had stared back at her from a compound eye a moment before.

She drew back, her heart pounding in her ears. But the little thing only cocked her head at her and said, sadly, breathlessly, in a voice like any little girl, "It's not only _him_ who gets new power from your sun."

Lois blinked. _Oh, God. Oh, no._

_The thing's a…super…something._

_And this child-creature knows about Superman. Which may be the worse of the two._

The little girl-creature took a deep breath. "It lives…for hours, only. After hatching." She coughed, a deep, racking shudder that doubled her over. "Less here, in this killing air. It won't be able to fly far. It will try for us again."

It occurred to Lois, as all her paradigms cried out for mercy, that those deep and desperate gasps came from lungs meant for another world altogether.

A crack shot through the air; they both jumped and turned to look. Hovering in the air forty feet from the window, the creature was trying frantically to break free of the Man of Steel, who was hanging on by one slick foreleg as it flailed. And then it backwinged, and swung its knife-edge hindsection desperately round, faster than sight, and struck him in the chest.

There was a sickening crack, two unbreakables colliding with inconceivable force. And he lost his grip, and fell, arcing out of her sight.

She closed her eyes and let out a shuddering breath. He might, or might not, be able to take the fall. But for them, it was over.

The thing clutched the edge of the wall and swung itself back inside the room. This time it moved urgently, rapidly, though its legs trembled beneath it, as it swung itself round to position at the girl-child. Its slick ovipositor opened; almost delicately, it positioned itself, and the slim thing shot out like a dart, faster than the eye.

And rebounded, without a scratch, though the child tumbled back flat on the ground.

_It's not only him who takes strength from your sun. _

The creature scrambled back to all its feet, brooding, heaving, gill-like flaps opening and pumping on its sides.

_Which would make me the only one in here who's _not_ invulnerable. For all it matters now._

Evidently coming to the same conclusion, it looked up and cocked its head, and fixed one hundred-sided eye on Lois instead.

She backed behind the pole, at the limits of the chain. She was _not_ going to go down jerking at it frantically, like the monster bait chicks in one of Clark's B movies.

The creature advanced and swiped aside the steel door propped up there, with one swinging leg, like a sheet of paper. It bent on itself horribly again, folded like paper, and positioned. She watched it dilate.

_Oh, God, Jimmy, be safe, be all right. Clark, if it got you, I pray it was quick. Superman, I'm sorry. I tried so hard._

_Please. Let it be quick._

And then Superman made groundfall between them, and the floor shook beneath him.

The creature checked itself in mid-strike, and fell over itself backwards.

With his broad back to her, his cape brilliant in the bare light, he looked more massive and unmoveable than all the structure round them. The room was suddenly small, and dingy, and very fragile. There was fury in the set of his shoulders, like a wrathful king, as he watched the thing scrabble on the floor.

Apparently, flight was back.

She wanted to laugh with giddy joy, like a small child. Instead she got hold of herself and called out, as the thing scrambled to its feet, "Superman! _It's like you_, under our sun."

Advancing on it, with his back to her, he stiffened momentarily, and she knew he had heard.

_But do I believe her, about the rest of it?_ And then she realized, thinking of the urgency in those milky eyes, that for the moment, she did.

"She says it's dying," she added, coughing in the concrete dust. "Hours."

Then the thing lunged forward, trying to dodge round him; doubtless wary of trusting his grip on those slick forelegs again, he caught its mandibles in his two hands and wrestled it to the ground.

As it scrabbled on the floor, its head in his grip, as he pinned its carapace between his legs and tangled it in his cape, he looked up at her for a fraction of a second. In that instant she felt his eyes peeling through her skin and flesh, tracing her bones and blood vessels, searching for harm.

_How, in light of recent events, did I ever consider_ his _eyes alien?_

He turned back and slammed the thing's head to the ground, cracking the concrete beneath it. She heard him mutter, "It hasn't _been _hours?"

She laughed, grimly, and caught herself on the verge of asking him about Clark as he wrestled with it.

But then the thing curved its hindsection round toward her as he wrestled with its fore, and he swung his head around and blasted his heat vision at it. The air around her crackled and the room shuddered with the energy, and steam hissed out of the cool night air.

And as she pulled back and covered her ears, she thought, _so that's back, too, _and despite everything, she smiled.In all the fears of kryptonite and madness for the last two days, she had almost lost track of the reason the skies of Metropolis were a place of awe. She flashed absurdly, for a moment, to Clark's kitchen, and Superman's hand on her wrist, holding her back from the cooking pot.

The thing shuddered and retracted its ovipositor, twisting around impossibly to protect it, while its carapace hissed with heat.

_So, do you like our world now? Do you? _

_I know, Lucy. I'm sorry. Once it's dead, I promise not to judge it. _

And then it was _too_ hot, and she buried her head in her arms, and was about to call out to him, to stop before her clothes caught a spark. He must have had the same thought. The crackling stopped in abrupt silence, and she opened her eyes as he rocketed into the thing again, knocking it back out through the fallen wall.

And they were back in the sky.

But it was different now. He didn't need to keep his grip. He didn't need to be so cautious. He only needed to keep it away from them. He knew, and the creature knew. And they broke apart in midair and regarded each other in silence, feeling the balance of power shifting around them.

It occurred to her, in that razor's edge near-stillness, that she had seen the Man of Steel many times in action, but never in battle.

She had seen him douse fires, break walls, carry victims, and freeze floods. He had taken bullets and bomb blasts for her. But all of those things were, to him, like opening a jar or thumbing a cigarette lighter. He had done them with quiet matter-of-factness, like a man opening a door for a stranger whose hands happened to be full. He had made it look almost ordinary.

But there, as she watched, the power she had always seen curled up at rest and ready ceased to wait.

_Welcome, Superman. I was hoping you would come._

The crack of their collision was like thunder. The air crackled with his heat, as the thing covered its eyes and blocked with its body. Then he was too fast to see, and then it was, too, all impact and velocity and fury, only visible in the strobe-light snapshots when they broke apart.

It was like a dream, in a Sisyphean hell. Again and again the creature made a rush, for their room - or now, apparently rethinking its fixation on the bird in the hand, for the open air. Again and again, he knocked it off course into the walls below, or flung it back against another building. She traced their trail by the destruction. Pieces of smokestack rained down from above, the factory walls became riddled with holes, they punched through the roofs of other buildings and wrestled out of sight in the depths of other factory floors.

They wrestled on the floor above her, and the ceiling spiderwebbed with cracks. And then they were off again.

Then Lois heard the child-creature coughing beside her, and turned back with a pang of guilty wariness. She had almost forgotten it was there. She looked in its milky eyes, wondering what its role was and what pity she should feel. Finally she said, "This air…_is_ it killing you?"

The little thing looked up at her gravely. "Not _quickly_." She cocked her head and glanced outside at the crumbling factory district. "This is a strange world, Lois Lane."

She leaned forward and fixed it with her eyes. "_Who are you_?"

The little creature looked of all things, embarrassed. Then she sighed, again, like an unfamiliar gesture. "Fifth Lateral Kingdom Police Department." The child shook her head, oddly stiff. "They caught me so easily, when I came through. I should have…called backup." Then those sentences were too much for her, and she leaned against the pole, gasping again.

_Of course._

Lois sighed. It was time to let her tired paradigms go altogether.

She opened her mouth, to ask whatever the appropriate follow-up question to that might be. _Why didn't you speak before? Is your backup coming to save you? How about, 'any idea how Clark's doing?'_

As if it read her mind, the little thing got out, "His power, regrowing, gave me hope. Before that, we were all of us dead already."

_So not worth talking to. _

_And people think _I'm_ harsh._

"What else can you see? Or sense? What about Clark?"

The little thing looked at her, and then out at the combatants, puzzled. "I don't understand. I see what you see."

Lois followed her eyes, and saw them crash together once more, over the dawn skyline.

But it was changing. The strength that could change the course of planets was now just absorbing one blow after another, unflinching and bottomless. As the thing's rushes grew shorter and less steady, Superman had stopped making his own charges and blasts of heat. He just blocked it, took its force against his chest like a rock breaking a wave, and thrust it back again. And again.

So implacable. And still so young.

How many times had he stood in a breach between worlds, blocking it with his body, and told no one? Like writing an article for someone else's byline.

_Clark, I know why you love him. He's a lot like you, after all._

The thing rushed once more, and he blocked it. And this time, it crumpled against him.

His arms reached out around and clasped it, almost gently. Like a faithful young angel of death, discharging his duty, no more and no less, he held it still. He watched the legs shudder and the gill folds shutter open and closed, as the orange dazzle of the sun broke over the skyline.

When it stopped, she realized she had stopped breathing, too.

Superman drifted to the ground to lay it down, eight stories below.

And she thought again, _Clark,_ and finally felt a foretaste of the cold desolation that might be coming.

But there wasn't time for that yet. She turned to the little girl, who was nodding with satisfaction, panting as hard as if she had done it herself. Perhaps what she had done was no less difficult.

"What happens now?"

The little thing looked up at her. Its luminescent eyes were strange, alien, but not unreadable after all. The expression was sorrow, and relief, and pity.

"Raveners are not permitted in this world. They know that well. The punishment will be terrible." She closed her eyes for a moment and then looked up at her again. "For you, there will be no more…diaphragms. No more speakers."

Footsteps pounded up the factory floor. G.M.P.D.? Marshall and his men, back for the pieces? Lois closed her eyes a moment and prepared herself to turn. The little girl looked behind her and then back at her, coughed, and said clinically, "And I think you'll cry, now."

_If it's Marshall or his man, I may have to get him close, try to strangle him with the chain._

_Sorry, Lucy. But I think He might understand._

She turned.

And there was Clark, pounding through the doorway, his jacket ripped, the dawn glinting through the shattered wall on his broken glasses.

She shook her head, and opened her eyes again. He was still there, staring at her in the doorway, looking her over, alive and breathing. More wonderful than daylight, or freedom.

As she felt just the dawning foretaste of a wild, reckless joy, Clark crossed with fluid, deadly grace past her to the child. Placing his body between it and Lois, he knelt and fixed it with his eyes. In a deadly quiet voice, he said, "What are you? What do you want here?"

Lois dropped to a sit and leaned forward on her arm against the pole. "Why, Clark," she said weakly, hearing a strange laugh from her own throat, "she's F.L.K.P.D."

He looked back at her. _God, he has beautiful eyes._

Then the child, still holding onto the pole, cocked her head at him. "Are you the Lord Protector of this world?"

Lois looked back up, ready for more madness. Clark's eyes widened behind his broken glasses. He grew very still, as he always did when he was nervous, and his every move and breath was as new and precious as the first dawn. _The world's mad, all the worlds are mad. But he's alive._

"Here, in this moment," he said finally, slowly, "I speak for this world."

She did make a mental note to talk to him later, about delusions of grandeur.

"What is it you want?" he asked softly.

The child let go of the pole, gingerly; she wobbled a bit but kept her balance.

And then she sank on one knee and bowed her head before him. "Your forgiveness." She coughed and gasped again. "This world should not have been breached for many years. And never like this." She looked up at him, shamefaced. "Not all of it…is like this." And then her legs trembled and she doubled with another coughing fit.

Clark tilted his head; his one hand reached out and hovered halfway between them. "You're not well. What do you need?"

She looked at him, with wonder in those opalescent eyes. "Are there many others like you, here?" Her breathing was slowing now, wearing out, and she could only get a few words out between breaths.

He grew very still again. "There are as many as there need to be."

The child-creature laughed ruefully, wearily. "Very good. Not to trust too easily, with a strange world."

_This world alone is too big. One room, my bedroom, is about the right size._

_And Clark, by the way, what's she talking about?_

The little thing looked back up at them again. "There is nothing here like our air. But eggs hatched in a host from _this_ world…they could have breathed this as their own. And all your world could not have stood against them." That wore her out completely, and her chest stopped heaving for a moment. Lois and Clark glanced at each other. And then she sucked another breath in.

She looked at Clark. "There should be no more breaches while you live. Though I know, now, you'll be watching."

Then she looked at Lois. "And it was you who sealed it. Well done."

And then something in the way she said it hit her. Lois looked at her more closely. "Wait a minute. Aren't they going to…take you home?"

The little thing looked at her, baffled. "_No_ more breaches."

She looked back and forth at their newly horrified expressions. "Even if we were so…cavalier, what you burned took centuries to build. It's not so easy."

_Which explains why no backup ever came._

Finally, looking at their faces, she smiled a little and said, "It's not what it looks like."

And her eyes flared and dimmed and she curled into a fetal position, and dropped on her side, and stopped gasping.

Just as that tired doorway finally cracked and crumbled, and the ceiling above, laced with cracks, began to fall in.

Clark stumbled over to Lois, pressing her down, shielding her with his body as one thing tumbled after another, after another. She buried her head in his chest, under his jacket, seeing those little eyes flare and fade again, and she wished dimly that it would just become clear, already, exactly _how_ they were supposed to die.

_And half the buildings in Shadyside are crumbling now, too. God only knows if Superman will make it back in time._

And then there was silence. He let her up, one hand still over her head. They looked around, at the obliterated doorway and the ominous sagging of the ceiling. The new spiderweb of hairline cracks encompassed her pole.

Lois pressed her forehead into his warm chest for a moment, getting control of her breathing. She gave herself a moment to feel his arms around her, the rise and fall of his chest, his hands smoothing her hair.

Then she took a deep breath and pulled back and looked at him. There was no time for probing the child-creature's strange questions, his strange replies or her strange not-quite-death. She fixed him in her mind instead - his dark eyes, those ridiculous glasses, the big gentle hands knocking over coffee cups and unwrapping candy bars and typing in-depth four-parters about mercy and justice.

"Clark," she said softly, "You have to go. Half of Shadyside's falling down. He may not be back in time. Try to dig out, before it all comes down."

He took her cheeks between his palms, his black hair moving a bit with the dawn breeze, the crack of sunlight over the skyline falling in his dark eyes as they searched her face. She noticed, irrelevantly, that when the sun hit his eyes and lit up their depths, he didn't blink at all.

"Lois," he said mildly, his voice trembling with weariness, "All those buildings are vacant. Do you _ever_ let guys who want to rescue you stick around?"

Lois smiled a little, and leaned into his hands. There was more to say, but he knew it already. And all his willful optimism would change nothing. And he must know that, too.

She said quietly, "Please. I already lost you twice, this week alone." She tried to laugh a little, but it came out all wrong. She held up her wrists, the chains clinking. "We took on two dimensions, but I still can't do a thing about these."

He took her little hands in his big ones and turned them over, palms up. He looked her over with his old bottomless, searching gaze.

And she realized that he was in fact going to take this of all moments, and this of all places, to finally make his own confession. All her agonizing over it seemed so laughable now, like a child's nightmares in the light of day. _Though he'd better, for the love of God, talk quickly._

Her eyes were blurring with tears, for him, for her, but her heart was weirdly calm. She was finally, utterly, certain that in this world of invulnerable parasite wasps, breaches between dimensions, and otherworld policemen struck down in the line of duty, there was nothing he could say that would astonish her.

"You don't have to, honey," he said gently, looking down at her hands. "You don't have to." And then, softly, looking back up at her, "Lois Lane, forgive me. For I've sinned against you time and again."

And he took the cuffs between thumb and forefinger and peeled them apart, like paper.


	9. Chapter 9

Clark lifted his hands from the ends of the opened cuff.

Lois stared down at the place they had left, at the bent-back curve of steel where her wrist lay. Slowly, she lifted her other hand and touched a finger to one of the pinched-off ends, as if it might perhaps bend like putty again.

Or as if it had opened of its own accord, and might close again as quickly.

He watched the comprehension of it seeping into her face. He felt her slow-spreading shock in his own body, like making groundfall. It would be with him the rest of his days.

Of course, with his recall, so would everything else.

Like the unholy voices that had come to him in his kryptonite madness. And every word they had said.

But primarily, this moment, dreaded and longed-for. When her brown eyes widened, and her mouth dropped open, and she lifted her face to look up at him. And said nothing at all.

_I'm sorry. I didn't plan to do it this way. I know what it feels like, to have the world go mad around you. _

Because now he saw, in her eyes, the same lostness he knew from the first touch of the kryptonite madness. From the pits and walls he'd seen in his path that hadn't really been there, as they led him through the factory for questioning. And _he_ had known what was happening. He knew the touch of kryptonite, as she knew the touch of shock.

Though he had never before realized that the shield of his skull was protecting his brain from it, until the moment when the diaphragm bent space to transmit it inside. He had never known kryptonite had that potential, never felt that intimate and wordless violation.

And now there was something similar shadowed in her eyes. _But you were so sure we were done for. I couldn't bear it. _

_Do you regret it already? _

Lois looked back down, and up again. Her heart was starting to race in her ribcage. She was wide-eyed, pale, searching his face, as he had watched her search a hundred, hundred witnesses and suspects.

_But what are you looking for in me?_

He swallowed. "Lois?"

As he watched her, staring at him as if she hadn't heard, his recall of the kryptonite voices came back like a cold finger on his neck. And the fears that had known him from childhood, that they had brought across the years to that night, reached out for him again.

About the humans all round him being, below their skins and behind their eyes, unknowable. Endpoints of an alien evolution. That unanswered question, whether he could ever know for certain what fermented in their minds. Or was it all one long, mutual misunderstanding? Was he, after all, alone on a planet of alien intelligences, all moving to currents subterranean and secret, that would one day shift?

_It's the kryptonite talking, Kent. You just haven't quite shaken it yet. _

_For the love of God, Lois, _please_ say something. _

"Oh," she said.

He snapped back into reality. _Tell me you understand, and it's all right. Let me mope around the newsroom for a few days, while you bring me food and proofread my articles._

Instead, looking down at her other hand still cuffed, he reached one hand out halfway and said, "May I?"

She looked down. Then she lifted her wrist up to him, mutely, looking back up at him with unreadable eyes. His hands trembling – _Kent, stop it, she'll think you'll slip and break her wrist_ – he took the metal between thumb and forefinger and peeled it away.

"Oh, God," Lois clarified, her voice shaking at the end.

Maybe she didn't know what to say. Maybe she wasn't saying more because, Loislike, she didn't want her voice to crack. But he couldn't take it anymore, this silence for his addled fears to run wild in.

"I'm so sorry," he said, and his voice sounded loud in his own ears. "I would have chosen somewhere else. But the cave-in…it…boxed me in a bit."

And then he heard the chopping of helicopter blades, rising from behind the skyline.

Jimmy must have made it.

_Lois, we don't have long. So would you process this in the next fifteen seconds, and then maybe give me a game plan in the ten after that?_

Lois took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Of all things, she got out a shaky little laugh.

She almost whispered, "_This_ is what you called a 'project'?"

And then her eyes opened and her glance went to the ripped-open wall, and he knew she heard the helicopter as well. It would be in sight in a moment.

He looked at her helplessly, thinking of all the hundred things he could say. "I'm sorry."

She looked at him mutely, back at an unLoislike loss for words, staring as if he were somehow changing before her eyes. The black G.M.P.D chopper cleared the skyline and banked toward them, a black dragonfly silhouetted by the sunrise.

Lois glanced at it. Then she focused down at the ground and shook her head violently for a moment, as if trying to fling off confusion like water. She took another deep breath and swallowed hard. He was afraid she might be fighting back tears.

And then she looked up at him, and held out the cuffs, dangling clinking from her hand.

"I guess Superman must have opened these," she said, almost levelly. "And then gone off to look for other victims."

For a moment he stared at her in horror, wondering if she could possibly have misunderstood everything. Or if he really had pushed her off the edge. Or if this was going to be that moment, when the human race became utterly alien.

The moment the kryptonite hallucinations had promised him was coming.

Then he realized she was trying to get their stories straight for the police.

"With the ceiling collapsing," he said numbly, "that was damned irresponsible of him."

_Don't tell me you're going to handle this better than I am._

"Only if we're still sitting under the cracks."

And she gave him a shaky smile, and got up and walked unsteadily to the edge. He followed behind her. By her profile, backlit by the dawn sun, it was far from over. She was keeping it together. But barely.

He got up and joined her at the edge.

"Lois, I…"

She swallowed. "And what about the kryptonite? Do you know if Marshall and his men took it?"

"_Lois_…I'm so sorry…"

As the chopper lowered itself by the wall, she turned and met his eyes. He saw there utter disorientation, incomprehension of the world they looked out on. And they looked at each other helplessly, as an officer leaned out of the chopper behind her, with his megaphone.

He stepped in close to her and whispered, over the chopper blades, "My parents' lives are in your hands."

She turned and looked at him, mutely. He saw the comprehension in her eyes.

"G.M.P.D. Is anybody in there injured?"

_Could you please, please leave, and come back in a couple of minutes? We were in the middle of a conversation. I can give her a ride home. Unless she never wants to see me again...We haven't cleared that part up yet._

"Officer," he said aloud, over the chopper blades, "thank God you're here."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

First, on the ground, the paramedics checked them over. In light of his supposed half-hour unconscious from going up against the ravener, it was the closest Clark had ever come to being taken to the hospital. He shuddered to think what _his_ head imaging would look like. He had to finally, politely, refuse, and then to convince them of his _competence_ to refuse.

Lois was mostly silent, as they cleaned and bandaged her jaw, except when they brought out the recovered kryptonite. With typical presence of mind, if less than her typical flare, she insisted they transport it separately, that she wouldn't stand being around it any more.

And as they badgered Clark about why he didn't want a workup of a likely intracranial bleed, his recall cut in on him again.

About the questioning room in the factory, where it had taken the last remaining bit of his strength to keep silent, while the doorway slid around the walls and the floor rippled beneath him.

He had been clinging desperately to his cover, trying to hide the signs of the madness while they questioned him about what he knew and who else knew it, how badly they had failed to hide their tracks by taking Lois and Jimmy. If they realized who he was…_Ma, Dad, all of Smallville, Perry, Lois, Jimmy_…he had recited their names again and again there, as the seal on his silence.

When the paramedics finished, they were taken to the station. They gave their statements separately, per G.M.P.D. protocol.

Their witness rooms were side by side, and he couldn't concentrate on his interview for the life of him. Partially, because he was watching Lois' through the wall, to keep their stories straight. And partially, because the floodgates of his recall had opened. It was just getting started with him.

_Fantasizing again, _the kryptonite voices had whispered in the questioning room in the factory.

_Not true! _he had answered silently. _I haven't let myself fantasize about Lois for over a year_. _It was a boy's crush back then. Selfish. I stopped!_

_Fantasizing, about a grateful world. About the love of humans. You study their muscles and their neurons firing as long as you like. You'll never know them. _

_I know mom and dad, _he had answered, watching his questioner's faces swim before him. Had he said it aloud?

_Like wasp maggots know the hosts they were laid in. The day's coming, Clark Kent, Kal-El, Superman, last son of Krypton, cuckoo chick in an alien nest. You'll find out you have no idea what happens behind their eyes, and that all the distance you traveled will not bridge it._

"Mr. Kent?"

He shook himself and looked up to meet the eyes of the weary forty-something officer across the table from him. The station coffee was getting cold in the styrofoam cup at his elbow. Under the single overhead light, there in the same bare room they used for both witnesses and suspects, she looked almost as worn-out as he was.

"I'm sorry."

"Not a problem. I said, did your human captors deliberately harm you in any way?"

He made up something halfway coherent. In her witness room next door, Lois was spinning out the bit about Superman breaking the chains and flying off, without a hitch.

But then her questioner added, "Ms. Lane, did he seem completely…recovered to you, by the end? Or was he still disabled?"

"In what way?"

"In any way. This was an unprecedented type of kryptonite attack, penetrating his brain in an unprecedented way. Anything you could remember might be important."

She hesitated. He heard his own heart pounding in his chest. What had she read there in his eyes in those moments? What did she know about him, that maybe he himself didn't?

She tilted her head and looked at her interviewer, the way she looked at people she interviewed. And then he heard the muscle units firing, as she tensed imperceptibly.

_There's Lois, too, _he had told the kryptonite voices in the factory_. I know her. She went into newspaper so she could tell the truth, to protect the innocent._

_Fantasizing again, _they had said._ Lois has always seen the alien in your eyes. She'll be the first to turn from you. _

And it was at that moment, as he had reeled, his own mind slipping through his fingers, that the kryptonite dazzle had gone out like a light switch. In a faraway room in that same factory, unknown to him then, Lois had just set fire to the diaphragm.

There in the witness room next door to him, she took a breath. She said, "By the end of the battle he seemed to me to be entirely himself. Which means, if anything, he recovered faster from transmitted kryptonite than he has from the standard attacks in the past."

Clark breathed again.

"Mr. Kent?"

"Sorry." He jerked his head back to look at his officer again. "I'm so sorry," he said, feeling genuinely bad for her. He wondered if Perry always felt this way during staff meetings.

He saw just a flash of irritation in her eyes, quickly swallowed by pity. There had been an edge in her voice, but she sighed and rubbed her eyes and looked back up at him, and spoke more gently. "No. _I'm_ sorry. You've been through…well…calling it traumatic doesn't do justice, does it? Don't you want to talk to a crisis counselor?"

_I want to talk to _Lois_. I want to go home and sleep. I want to forget the desperate eyes of the ravener, and the filthy blank faces of the children, and the little police-girl – you would have liked her, ma'am – and the kryptonite voices._

_I had _better_ go home and sleep, before my thoughts start coming out aloud._

"No, ma'am. I apologize. I just don't remember everything too well. I keep trying to think of something to add, but I'm never sure if I'm remembering or imagining."

She nodded. "We could get the EMTs back within fifteen minutes. It's no trouble for them. Plenty of victims think they're fine till the adrenaline wears off. That's when things start to hurt."

"Thank you, ma'am. I just want to go home. I mean, I want to help, of course. I just…is Lois all right?"

His officer blinked. "Is that the hurry, then?" She looked at him with new sympathy. "We're almost done here. Two more questions. And then we'll be done for today." She smiled wryly. "Though you know we're going to be good friends for months to come."

"Yes, ma'am. Thank you. What else was there, then?"

She peered at him over her own glasses, meeting his eyes through the jagged cracks in his. "Mr. Kent, why on earth did you act on your own, without even _contacting_ the G.M.P.D.?"

He blinked.

_Because I didn't know they could target me without identifying me first. Because they said they'd kill her if they caught sight of you. _

_And because I have no idea how deep Luthorcorp's roots go here, ma'am, and I've been afraid for a year that they include your department. _

Aloud he said, "Was that illegal?"

She looked at him in real exasperation this time. "It was _reckless_, Mr. Kent. I don't have the heart just now to take you to task for it the way you deserve. But it was a damnfool way to be macho, and you put them all in more danger by doing it. Vigilante justice only works in Gotham City."

Despite everything, he almost laughed at the macho part, but he held it in.

"No, ma'am. I know it was reckless. But I can honestly say I haven't been thinking my clearest tonight. Today. I kept seeing…imagining them…" He rubbed his eyes. Thankfully, his recall had fallen silent for the moment. "Was there another question?"

She looked down over her paperwork. There was nothing left on her sheet. "No," she said, unexpectedly loudly. "I think that's all. Why don't you get yourself together for a moment, and then I'll go see how Ms. Lane's coming?"

He nodded mutely.

His officer got up to the door and opened it. She looked both ways in the grey, silent hall. Then she closed the door softly and came back to him.

Clark looked up at her, puzzled. She put a finger over her lips. She took another sheet from her stack, a little post-it note with a handwritten question, and turned it around to face him. He looked down at it.

_Was there any mention of Luthorcorp?_

He looked up at her, astonished. She looked pointedly around the room.

He didn't have to follow her. The perfect clarity of his peripheral vision had noted speakers in the four ceiling corners the moment they entered. Exhausted he might be, but not blind.

And the next moment he knew, sickly, without a doubt, what had raised Lois' hackles a moment before.

Clark shook his head slowly. They looked at each other across the table in utter, wordless mutual comprehension. He took the pen from her hand. _How many in this department?_ he wrote. His hands had stopped shaking.

She took it back. _If we knew, it would be easy. _

She hesitated a moment. Then she added, faster, almost scribbling, _Keep writing your articles, Mr. Kent. But both of you, watch your backs. Someone knew Ms. Lane was still at the Planet that night. Maybe someone who saw her there, when he was leaving work._

Clark looked up at her in horror.

"Do you feel all right to go now?" she said aloud cheerfully, taking the note.

"Yes, ma'am," he said numbly. "I feel much better."

Lois was still being questioned when he got out to the station waiting room, but Perry and Jimmy were there. Jimmy had finished giving his shorter statement an hour before, and had been pacing the halls in the interval, while Perry sat reading the same page of a four-month-old magazine, over and over. The kids had been taken directly to Metropolis Children's Hospital.

Perry got up and studied him, his eyes shining in his grizzled face, almost overflowing. He had aged ten years in forty-eight hours.

"She's okay, Chief," Clark said simply. And Perry shook his hand, without speaking, his Adam's apple working.

"And you, son?"

Clark smiled wearily. "I will be."

He turned to Jimmy and they embraced, wordlessly, for a long moment. "You know they've got no leads on the men?" Jimmy said over his shoulder.

"I know," Clark said quietly. "And no Luthorcorp connection. What about the kids?"

"All okay," Jimmy said simply. "Filthy. Full of chocolate."

Clark held him out at arm's length, and held out his hand. Jimmy took it and they shook, solemnly. "Well done, soldier," Clark heard himself saying, his own voice hoarse in his ears.

_Good man. These good-hearted, faithful men…it's not so mysterious what goes on behind _their_ eyes, is it? Is it?_

It occurred to him, the next moment, that the slips Jimmy accepted without question might raise an eyebrow with Perry. It was probably time to say something goofy. And then he decided he was too tired to care.

In fact, he wondered in passing if it would be too outrageous to relax a little more around the newsroom, to tone down the goofiness just a bit. Surely that was plausible, reasonable, after two years?

_Now that's _definitely_ the kryptonite talking._

And then he heard Lois' footsteps, rounding the corner with her officer, and they all looked up together.

Her jaw was covered with a clean bandage. Her steps were weary, with none of the crispness that greeted him every morning at the office. She was slumping, the way she never did in public. But she saw them and lifted her head, and smiled, and it was like the sunrise all over again.

Perry and Jimmy rushed her, and threw their arms around her, tangling themselves up together, while Clark watched silently. He had never thought she would do well in a group hug. But half-laughing, half-asleep, she didn't seem to mind.

And then, watching them, he finally, finally, allowed himself to think, _They're safe. They're safe. Whatever she thinks about me, whatever she decides…even if the kryptonite voices were right about that…that smile, and that mind and spirit are still here. _

And then there was a call for help, on Sixth and Kingsfield.

Weary as he was, he caught himself reaching for his shirt buttons there in the middle of the police station.

Mentally he smacked his forehead. His hand froze and dropped, just as Jimmy and Perry stepped aside, and his eyes and Lois' met across the room.

He swallowed. Into that silence he said, "Just remembered. Very important. Better go."

Perry and Jimmy blinked. Jimmy looked merely baffled; Perry looked almost disappointed in him for bungling the moment.

And Lois' eyes widened. And as he watched mutely across the room, for once he could read her like text, as her mind scrolled through all his history of strange disappearances, transformed in the altered light of that one new truth. And he stared at her, unable under Jimmy and Perry's gaze to even use his eyes to plead with her.

"Clark," she said into the silence, her voice a little shaky. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but could you maybe chase that last lead without me?" She looked back at him, exhausted but steady, unblinking.

It was an unbelievable moment. To Jimmy and Perry, most likely, because after two years of apprenticeship, Lois was turning him loose. And to Clark because, he realized, in a hundred hundred such awkward emergencies, he had never had anyone hand him his excuse.

Then he realized he hadn't breathed out for a full minute. He let his breath out, and breathed in again, and said, "Of course." After a moment, looking at her, he added, "After all, I got off easy."

"Be careful," she said softly. "He has enemies everywhere." Her eyes moved pointedly around the room.

And he looked at her, the strength of her small shoulders, the faithful unceasing rhythm of her heart, the cycling of her blood. The fluid in her jaw tissue was beginning already to drain back to its right place in the veins. He watched her wordlessly, grimly, but aware at the same time of the warmth of a little bright flame of hope.

Burning low but steady, like a lighter, like the lucidness looking back at him from her eyes.

He left.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Clark woke with his throat dry, soaked in sweat, with an unaccustomed draft blowing over him.

He opened his eyes and looked down.

The covers were parted over the length of his body. He had ripped them clean in half. He sat up, and lifted them, and there were smaller tears near his elbows and toes. He had thought, stumbling into bed after stopping the mugging, with Lois already home asleep, that he was too weary to dream.

He rubbed his eyes and looked for the clock. It was after seven. By the waning winter light outside, that was seven in the evening. He had slept for twelve hours. He usually needed two.

Then, moved by a dark premonition, he checked the date on his watch. He had slept, in fact, for two days.

He looked around the room again, wondering if the walls would buckle and the doors would move.

He had dreamt of the policewoman, passing notes to him. And at first, they said the words she had really written. But then he had looked down and seen, looking back at him, the words _fantasizing again. _

He had looked up at her, and seen there instead the milky eyes of the ravener – no, of the police-child. She smiled at him wryly with her last gasping breath and said, "_Best not to trust too easily, with a strange world." _And then she died at his feet.

And then they had been back in the factory, with the police-child still there at his feet, with the ruined wall open to the sunrise. He looked around, and there was Lois, looking down at her peeled-apart handcuffs. She had looked up at him and said, wondering, "I should have guessed, from the kung pao chicken."

"Lois," he had said miserably, "I'm sorry. I stopped fantasizing a long time ago. Also, about being Superman." He didn't want to look in her eyes, but he had to, to see whether there was an alien, a stranger, staring back out.

But they were grave, and wide, and full of pity, like those of another of her kind in a Kansas farmhouse. She had cocked her head and looked at him, and shaken her head slowly. "Clark Kent, Kal-El, Superman, last son," she said gently, "you _really_ need to lighten up."

Sitting on the edge of his bed, replaying it, Clark realized his heart was racing again. He went into the bathroom, splashed cold water on his face, and sat back down again, looking over the ripped wreckage of his sheets. He hadn't done that since puberty.

He shook his head and pulled his thoughts together.

_Clark Kent, you really need to lighten up._

He sighed. He probably did. And the kryptonite voices and the dreams didn't change anything. All the human world, as unending aliens to him, and he to them - he hadn't been tormented this badly by those fears for years, but it wasn't a new wound. Just the reopening of an old one. And he had come to truces with it already before, time and again.

Admittedly, not as successfully as he'd thought. But tomorrow would be better, and the following day better still.

"But I'll have to get new sheets," he said aloud, his own voice sounding strange to him.

_And I have to talk to Lois. Because kryptonite madness and eternal aliens or no, we still have a lot to talk about. _These boy's fears of his were one thing. The real complexities he had just dropped in her lap were another.

She had defended his cover and his mysteries without dropping a beat. She didn't hate him. Probably. He knew without thinking, without questioning, that she would be his ally and guard his secret faithfully.

_But that's not really the question, is it, Kent?_

Because it would require no fury, no compulsion for exposure, for her to find it unbearable to keep the Man of Steel in her life. Deathbed good intentions in the factory were one thing. The innate, unforceable intricacies of relationships, which either worked or didn't, were another. She had never been comfortable with that side of him.

And he had already promised he would understand.

_And if it does change everything, that's all right. Muggings and robberies and hate crimes aren't going anywhere. And I won't be a cuckoo chick. I won't make the world suffer for my own insecurities._

_Lois, would you proofread that thought for me? I'm a little tired, and I'm not sure it made sense. I think I'm worn out from writing about that last Superman crisis._

"Clark," she said softly, "are you up?"

He jerked his head up, and looked around the room for her.

Then he felt like a fool. It had been years since he'd assumed things he heard must be nearby. No, she was calling him from her apartment. He could almost see her on her balcony, leaning over the railing, the wind just lifting her dark hair from her thin shoulders, her clear eyes peering out into the haze over the city.

Despite everything, Clark felt himself smiling in the half-dark of his room. She was, apparently, no slouch on the possibilities for convenience his abilities afforded.

He got up to shower.


	10. Chapter 10

Clark pushed the spare pair of glasses up the bridge of his nose and lifted his hand to knock. Hand in the air, he caught himself on the verge of loosing his deep vision to peer into Lois' living room.

He dropped his hand and shook his head violently. _Well done, Kent. Chances are, she's not hoarding kryptonite. But she might be dressing._

Just the final evidence, he thought with weary resignation, that his veneer of philosophizing was just that. He should leave, and page her for an extension, and wait till he could pull it together.

No. He had kept her waiting long enough. _She_ had gotten no time the morning before, to get her own thoughts together.

But he _was_ still touched by the kryptonite madness, his emotions still slipping out of his grasp at the wrong times.

He was, in fact, suddenly taken aback by his own rashness in coming at all, in expecting either of them to be ready for this conversation. What had he been thinking? How single-mindedly, unreasonably, had he wanted to see her?

_If you start acting like this, you'll blow your cover by next week. And then you'll get to have this conversation with everyone you know. _He turned to go.

Then the door opened behind him, and Lois peered out from behind it.

Had she heard him? Or had she been checking the peephole?

She had changed the bandage on her jaw. She looked, not well, but better.

He couldn't read her expression. He wanted to drop through the floor. He wanted to take off. Instead, he looked down at his flannel shirt and his jeans and said, absurdly, "I wasn't sure what to wear."

She leaned her head against the side of the door, cracked a ghost of a smile, and said, "For coming in? Or for skulking outside?"

He blinked. He opened his mouth to say something, but the next moment, her face dropped and she said, "Sorry." She backed up, swinging the door open with her.

He stood there on the threshold, looking at her in her oversized sweatshirt, her hair damp from the shower, small and warm and alive. He felt himself unclench just a little. No matter how well or badly things went, whatever well or badly was in this context, she was all right.

"_Do_ you want to come in?" she asked softly.

"Should I?"

She looked down at the floor and laughed ruefully. "You see, if we put if off, my coping mechanisms will kick back in. They're _bad_ mechanisms. They actually make things worse."

She sounded almost like herself. Though the content was less than promising. He smiled.

In fact, he wanted to laugh. But he had had a showertime epiphany.

Anything he did that invoked their old relationship would make a reciprocal demand on her. Laughing would demand a laugh in reply. Teasing her would be reclaiming a license it had taken her a year to grant him. She would have to accept or reject it, and she would hesitate to hurt him.

And he was not, tonight of all nights, going to manipulate her like that. So he just stepped in, and she closed the door behind him.

"You're all right?" they asked softly, together. And they nodded, together.

They looked at each other for a moment, there in the warmth of her living room.

Lois swallowed, and said, "Come on. I made coffee." She turned and moved behind her kitchen bar. Clark watched her hands, bemused, as she poured a black cup of her thick brew and stirred in two creams and then two sugars to smooth it out. She handed it to him across the bar, and he took it from her little hand. His appetite was utterly dead, but the warmth of it felt good.

He looked up at her face. "Thank you." And then he added, "And thank you, for covering for me at the station."

_It was a luxury I've never tasted, Lois. It left me stunned, touched, dumbfounded. _

But he had sworn to himself, in the shower, not to say things like that. Not to do anything to invoke that fierce protective instinct that nearly shut down her thinking altogether.

She smiled, and the sweetness of it cut him to the heart. He wanted to smile back, wanted to say, _You might even have been right about holding on to that lighter, after all. _But the impulse convicted him, of that desperate desire to know they were all right, sooner than he had any right to ask.

He clamped his mouth shut.She swallowed, and dropped her eyes.

After a moment, she looked back up at the untouched cup in his hand. "Do you…actually taste it?"

Clark set the cup down and looked at her, for anger or wariness. But there was only curiosity in her eyes.

Then, under his gaze, she blushed a bit and almost dropped her eyes. It _was _her Superman reaction.

"As far as I know," he said quickly, to break that moment, "taste, for me, works the same way as it does for you. Yes, I taste it."

He wanted to add,_ I never deceived you about that. _But that would sound like throwing back at her an accusation she hadn't made. Or had she? Lois might be quick on the trigger, but she rarely missed the implications of what she was saying.

She raised her eyebrows. "What about spicy foods?"

He blinked. "Not spicy to me," he admitted. "It's the same with alcohol, poisons..."

"Stomach flu?" she finished. And he smiled, in moderation. "What about smell?"

He sat down carefully on her barstool. "It's the same, to my knowledge. But the noxious smells – like ammonia, or decay – don't bother me."

Lois nodded. She almost opened her mouth, and then stopped. He just caught himself, on the verge of smiling wryly and saying, _maybe eyesight next? _

She had been always most comfortable with Superman when talking business. So instead, he said, "Have you heard anything, about their luck finding Abraham Marshall?"

She shook her head. "And who knows what he was, really? The deal broker? Or the right-hand man, or just the chief of goons?" She looked up at him. "But what's ea…what's killing _me_ is this. How do you first _approach_ another dimension, to see if they have dangerous toys and want to trade them?"

"YesExactly._"_ _And the thing we never learn to pay attention to, that I have no idea if I'm getting closer to, is this. How do we keep it from happening again?_

But that was a different conversation, four long days ago. And it was time to start the one they needed to have.

So instead he said, "Lois."

She looked at him mutely, her hands clasped round her own cup of coffee.

"This was unfair to you, beyond description. Beyond justification. You deserved so much better."

She was silent, searching his face for something. He schooled his face to stay still, simple, making no demands.

"You know why I did it. People known to be…my parents…would be the most hunted people on the planet." He did hear the fear in his own voice, then, and clamped it back under control, before it got into the human audible range. "But I know it was still essentially…" _Oh, God. _"…a human sacrifice."

"Now, _that's_ a bit…" she started to say, and then apparently thought better of it, and fell silent.

He swallowed, looking down at the cream-colored formica of her cabinet, at the intersecting scratches on the surface. "And now you have the aftermath, and there's no one who's gone through it, to help you."

Lois tilted her head. "There isn't?"

He looked up at her. It was a moment before he understood the question. "I'm sorry. Just my parents, and you. And of course, it was different for them. For us."

She nodded slowly.

_All right, Kent. Be a man and say it, without squirming. Don't cheat and plead between the words. _"But I have to be sure you know this. All I'm asking from you is that secrecy. I'm not here to try to… invoke an old relationship, and expect you to blithely drop back into it. I understand that this changes things. That you have every right to be furious."

Lois swallowed, and toyed with her spoon. She was silent for a long moment, and he wanted to bury his face in his hands, and say, _Oh, God, Lois. I really am sorry._

But that would pull in her protective instincts all over again.

Then she looked up and said, as if the words were difficult, "Did you sleep all this time?" She raised her eyebrows. "I can't imagine your wanting to take in more Monster Channel."

He blinked. He'd never once seen her sidestep like that. Was she stalling? Was it too soon, after all?

She must have taken his surprise at the change of subject for something else. Something changed in her eyes. "Or…do you sleep?"

"I haven't woken since that last emergency." He hesitated. Or was she just gathering her will, to say what she knew would be hard? "I usually need, maybe, two hours in a day."

"The rest of the time, you fly patrol."

Clark nodded. "It's helpful. In fact, it's the only possible way to keep up two…to keep this up."

Lois took a deep breath. She hesitated a moment. Then she pushed away from the bar, her stool scraping on the tile floor. She came around in front of him. She was a full six inches shorter, standing, than he was sitting on her low barstool. He could smell her shampoo.

Not, he realized, her cigarettes. He felt a weary little flash of pride. He had expected her to chain-smoke the remainder of her stash over this. He barely stopped himself from congratulating her.

Then he remembered he had thrown it all out a month ago.

"I'm not…upset with you," she offered.

Clark's heart pounded.

He stilled himself ruthlessly. Because anger was never that simple. And because after it first flared, or didn't flare, the question was what was left standing.

"Actually," she revised, "this time, I might be. I'm not sure yet. I'm perfectly aware I'm still shellshocked."

_And we should never, never, never have started this tonight._ "I know," he said gravely. "It's too soon. I'm sorry. I could come back. You could take…as long as you need."

"Wait," she said softly.

She looked up at his glasses.

_Please, Lois, leave them on. Don't make it even worse. _

But she didn't reach for them. She just studied them for a moment. "You don't update your prescription too often, I'm guessing." She hesitated, searching his face. "What _about _eyesight?"

More stalling? Real curiosity? Both?

A week before, he would have teased her about whether they were on the record. "The anatomy's similar. My optic nerves don't cross, like yours. But the major difference is the photoreceptor density. Mine are much smaller, more tightly packed."

She pulled up her other barstool and sat backwards on it, facing him. "How much more?"

"About ten orders of magnitude. But the medium is still ordinary light. I can't see anything smaller than its wavelength."

"So that you have the equivalent of light microscopy."

"But not electron microscopy, yes. Exactly." He looked up at her, feeling the pale ghost of his first excitement in discovering these things. They had talked for hours about politics and science; she had teased him for his fascination with the physical world. But he had never talked with anyone about this.

"And the heat vision?" There was a curious intensity in her voice.

_Keep it together, Kent. Don't sound like a puppy she'll have to take in._

He kept his voice neutral. "Rapidly alternating the polarity of a magnetic field, like a microwave. But the field is distorted, tightly focused."

_Of course, the question is how you 'focus' a magnetic field, out of its natural shape, at all. Let alone to where it's nearly linear. It's a scientific mystery. _

_Personally, I do it by squinting. _

_But that's more than you want to know._

She paused, as if she had in fact expected more. Finally she nodded, looking troubled. "And the hearing?"

Clark hesitated. It was strange, this succession of questions like an interview, with this undercurrent of tension. She didn't seem to like the answers she was getting. But what other answers could she have hoped for?

"The basic mechanism is the same as yours. The difference is in the precision of the elements. And the number of dedicated neurons making up the pathway."

"Ten orders of magnitude again?" There was that edge in her voice, that strange heat in her eyes. Was she doing this to pour salt in her own wound?

No, of course not.

It hit him like another man would feel a punch in the gut. She was doing it to get the distance she needed. She was building up the image of the stranger, till it was clear enough to give her the strength to send him away

_Lois has always seen the alien in your eyes. She'll be the first to turn from you._

And it made the sting of their conversation in the newsroom a few days ago pale in comparison. Because this time, she knew exactly what she was doing. The questions, the stalling, it was all building to that moment. And she was almost there. There would be no time even to brace himself before the hammer fell.

He closed his eyes for an instant. It would be as gentle as she could make it, of course. Lois was only harsh when obeying her compulsions about speaking truth to power. She was never rough with the helpless.

Clark opened his eyes and looked at her, at the wreckage of his hopes. It seemed as if the lights should flicker or the floor tremble. He swallowed hard, but schooled his face to stay still. Because if that was what she wanted, his place was to help her with it.

And if it did invoke his boyhood fears and his kryptonite dreams, it was a shame, but then they all shared the seed of the same truth.

So he answered in exactly the same soft tone as before. "Twelve orders of magnitude, in this case. With commensurate effects on the number of simultaneous signals I can take in."

His nonhuman forebrain was already planning the path ahead. It would take a few weeks, at least, to get everything in place to leave Metropolis. The hardest part would be passing on his work on Luthorcorp. Because in all the _Planet, _all their history aside, the only person could take it over properly was still Lois Lane.

They would have to talk at least once more, and at length. Maybe they could do it, if he gave her a week.

"So do you process all of it at once?" Her voice jerked him back to the present, to a conversation he was thinking of as if it had already ended. "Do you _think_ like thousands of people at once?"

_Is that where you think this ends? A thousand aliens, instead of one? No wonder it's always made you nervous. _

_I'd give it to you, to end this, if I could. But that's beyond my power._

"No, Lois," he said finally, softly. "Just one." He looked at her.

Her eyes widened, as if he'd said something critical without realizing it. She was almost thrumming with tension, at total odds with her words. She was building to a head.

"So I have to pick and choose," he added after a moment.

"Does it ever get distracting, in staff meetings?" she almost whispered. She was almost done.

_Oh, _especially_ during staff meetings,_ some part of him said. But that didn't belong here any more. No room for inside jokes, for defusing what she was trying to build, for making her start all over.

So he said, amazed that his voice held steady, "It's manageable." And he waited for the hammer to fall.

And then instead, to his astonishment, he saw tears well up in her eyes, and her face trembled. "Okay," she whispered. "I get it, already. Just…give me a minute." And she turned away from him.

He dropped down off his barstool and stared at her, at her back and her shaky breathing as she braced herself on the counter.

He had the sinking feeling this was not what the hammer was supposed to look like.

"Lois?" _Now what am I supposed to do? _

_Could I have been wrong? _

She was fighting not to cry, clamping down her glottis and diaphragm. Was she having second thoughts? Could it, as the final twist of the knife, be up to _him_ to make the last move to turn her loose? Was he up to to it?

He watched mutely as she stilled herself. Lois always wanted her space when she was trying not to cry.

Finally, low, almost whispering, she got out, "Was Clark ever even part of you at all?"

"What?" He dropped back down on the barstool.

That wasn't in the script either.

She shook her head, keeping her back to him. "You didn't have to do this," she whispered. "I was just trying to fix the damn poached byline."

"What?" He heard the distress in his own voice. "I don't understand."

She turned and raised her face to him. He saw the devastation in her eyes, too deeply stricken even for anger. "Please don't patronize me, Superman."

He blinked.

"Did you think I was getting close that night? I wasn't." She closed her eyes for a moment, and then opened them on him again, raw and shattered. "Even if I had been, I knew what I owed you. I _liked_ you. I wouldn't have outed you for a _Planet_ exposé!" She swallowed. "You didn't need a _second_ cover."

"Oh, God," he whispered, as he felt the room and the last half hour spin around him, to replay everything through her eyes.

She had only been trying, all along, to find out which one he really was.

And he, turning his terror of losing her into his damned macho mantras about self-restraint and not influencing her choices, had played the alien to the hilt. Her every attempt to reach out to him had bounced off his impervious skin. And his thick, thick skull.

Leaving her alone with a stranger, who didn't speak her language, whose eyes she would never see behind. Whose affection had been feigned, his motives barely comprehensible, his heart aloof and alien. Leaving her, essentially, alone in his own nightmare.

"Oh, Lois," he whispered raggedly, looking at her in horror. "Oh, God, honey, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it. I was trying…I thought you wanted…I was…"

He trailed off and stood there, torn. His best-laid plans were crumbling down around them, like concrete rubble; the choking dust filled the air between them. She looked back at him in utter confusion, searching his face, her tears shivering in her eyes. "Clark?"

He swallowed. "It's me, honey. I'm right here."

"Then _what are you_ _doing_?" Her voice cracked.

He stared at her mutely, torn in half, afraid to explain the line of thought that had brought him there, terrified that his fears were thick and tangible in the air. That if he spoke, she would sniff them out, and their mute demands would have hold of her forever.

"Oh," she said softly, her voice trembling. "I know _that_ look."

Lois took two steps and closed the distance between them. She took his face between her palms and held him facing her. She fixed his eyes with hers. "What confession can you possibly have left? _What is it you're trying not to say_?"

_And all you accomplished, _Mom was saying,_ was denying folks their right to a say in which burdens they bear._

"Clark Jerome Kent," she said, with a trembling intensity that pinned him to the floor. "The truth's not _your _lapdog, either. If this is about me, if you're not protecting some _other_ set of parents, _it's time."_

Clark bowed his head. He swallowed.

And he said, low and defeated, "It's just this." He forced his eyes up to meet hers. "If you leave me alone on this world, Lois Lane, I'll get eaten alive."

She was silent for a moment.

"Oh," she said softly.

And then she flung her arms around him, both an embrace and a tackle, a hold. "_No_, Clark. No. No, no, no. _No."_

He drew in a gasping breath, feeling her warmth against him, her words sinking into him. She was staying. He was panting, shuddering with the thunder of his dam's fall as it flooded him. She was staying. And the arms that had changed the course of planets trembled, as he stood and pulled her close.

He pressed her head to his chest, smoothing her hair. "Lois," he whispered, reeling, "I didn't mean it. I didn't. You know me. You know me."

She lifted her head again and met his eyes. He saw there the bloom of utter comprehension, wordless understanding. The same things that had looked out at him from the eyes of another of her kind, in a Kansas farmhouse.

"You thought I'd do _what? _No. No, no, no, no, no. I thought _you_…that you never even…"

He folded her back in his arms, one hand cradling her dark head, smoothing her hair, breathing like a man coming up for air. Her wiry little arms tightened around him, till they might have squeezed the breath from another man, the both of them shaking together. "It's okay, honey. It's okay. You know me. You know me."

Finally she pulled back, gently, to look in his eyes. Hers were rimmed with red. He could only imagine what his must look like.

She searched his face. "Clark?"

He swallowed. "I'm right here, sweetheart."

"I'm sorry about that."

He laughed once, incredulously.

"No, I mean, I really _wasn't_ going to do that." She laughed shakily. "I was going to be so understanding, whichever one…was…you know. I was trying so hard not to tell you, _be Clark, dammit_! Because I _did_ understand. I knew it was the hand you were dealt. But then I…there's not much left in the world that's still what I thought it was."

Clark nodded gravely. He dried off her cheeks with his thumbs, and cupped her face in his hands a moment. Then he reached down and felt for her hands, small and cold, and folded them in his. They looked at each other, like the last rescued survivors of the end of the world.

If the kryptonite voices came back, he thought dimly, he would have to tell them. They had become their own answer. There were no unknowable minds here, no eternal aliens.

Because that same fear that had eaten at him, about humans, had looked back at him from human eyes about himself.

"Lois," he said softly, "I'm so sorry. Forgive me. I thought you were trying…I didn't want to push you…what an ass."

She shook her head, half-laughing, half-sobbing. Her hands tightened on his.

He took a deep breath. "You don't know how long I wanted to tell you."

She smiled wryly at him, through the tears glimmering in her eyes. "Lucy has a quote for everything. For everything there's a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. I think sooner would have been too soon." She laughed, or sobbed. "If you thought _this _was bad…"

He pulled her close again, feeling his eyes fill up with tears again, shaking his head. He smoothed her hair down and fit her against him, trying to anchor her. "No. You were amazing. You were perfect. You were patient, beyond my wildest dreams." At that he felt her shake with laughter against him.

After a long moment he said, "You know I trusted you from the beginning. Or almost."

She laughed softly at his backpedal.

He held her back out at arms' length and met her eyes. "But people have been…making other people talk for thousands of years. Long before the diaphragms. And I couldn't…you can't calculate a risk like that. And… oh, God…" He looked at her helplessly. "Mom won't even get an alarm. I had to beg her on my knees to let me add a deadbolt. And I _know_ she doesn't use it."

Lois laughed helplessly. The last tears were still glimmering in her eyes. "More trusting than you? Or more reckless than me?"

"Almost as brave as you." He laughed ruefully. "And she reads minds."

She looked at him for a long time. "She gave you an ultimatum. Didn't she. Maybe four days ago?"

Clark looked at her wryly. "You wouldn't buy that I just couldn't take it anymore?"

"Your capacity for 'taking it'," she said dryly, "is apparently almost limitless."

He blinked. It might be true that not _all _humans were in on strange and alien secrets. But clearly the females all had regular secret meetings.

They fell silent and looked at each other, swimming in the dawning absurdity of it all. "We need to work on our exposition, Kent," she said after a long moment, and they laughed.

And then, studying him, moving along some strange, thread-thin beam of human or female or Loisine intuition, she asked again, "Clark, what did they do to you?"

He looked at her for a long moment, wondering if it was right to burden her with it all. But then he had, apparently, a poor track record with weighing burdens.

And so he told her, about the kryptonite madness, about the world moving wrongly around him, and then the demon whispers invoking his oldest fears. He tried to be vague at first. But she gave him a piercing look, and then he told her what they had said about her.

She looked stricken, and then furious, and then just floored by the irony of it all. That was the worst of it, but she wanted the rest. And so he told her about the flashbacks of his recall during the police questioning, and then about the addled dreams that had followed.

When he finished, she looked, Loislike, enraged. She was trembling again, this time with anger. He had a half-notion she would be out the door in a minute, to find the kryptonite voices and take them on.

"There's no one here to throttle, sweetheart," he said, laughing, safe again in her presence, in her eyes.

Lois shook her head, and came up to his barstool again. This time she stood on the bottom rung, using his shoulders for balance, where his forehead was even with hers, and pressed their foreheads together. "But I'll find someone, someday," she murmured. "And _then_ I'll throttle them."

He laughed, and realized there were still tears in his eyes, and didn't really want ever to speak again. They were at peace. It was more than enough.

But there, in the warm space they had carved out, the questions might be gentler but still remained. After a long moment, he took a breath. "What I meant to say," he started, "back when I was being an idiot –"

She laughed.

_Oh, God, she's beautiful. _"I thought you wanted an out. I was trying…I mean, you can still want an out…"

She laughed helplessly. "Which part of 'no, no, no, no, no' was ambiguous?"

He set her down on the floor, gently, and tipped her head up to look at him. "Lois."

She raised her eyebrows.

"What I mean is, what _about_ Superman?"

She sat back on the stool, and was silent for a moment. She looked up at him. "Clark, can I ask you a favor?"

"Anything."

"_Please_ don't refer to yourself in the third person any more. It makes me want to chain-smoke the rest of my stash."

He shifted uncomfortably. "About that. I may have…misplaced it a little."

Lois buried her head in her hands. Her shoulders shook with laughter.

"I won't do it anymore. The third-person part. But Lois…"

She looked up at him, more solemn. She nodded. "I know. I know. But _you_ have to talk to _me_ first. What part of you is he?" She smacked her forehead. "And look. Now you've got me doing it."

He laughed. Then he sobered. "Honestly?"

She nodded.

"The coping mechanism."

Lois laughed, as if she half-understood it, and then waited for the other half.

"You saw tonight. It's how I react to the face of…danger."

She raised her eyebrows. "Danger? Tonight?"

Clark laughed. "I'm _still_ shaking." Then he sobered again. "But you see better than you realized, I think. The way I react at those times, the way I think…it's _not_ human. It never will be." He looked at her helplessly.

She nodded, holding his eyes. "I know that."

After a moment she looked down. "Clark, I know this is outrageous, but can I…I need to…" Her hand lifted from his and hovered halfway between them. Her eyes went to his shirt buttons. "May I?"

Clark blinked. Mutely, he nodded. He turned from the counter and clasped his hands in his lap.

Lois stepped in closer, between his knees. She lifted her hands; they were trembling. But she undid the top button successfully. And then the one below it. And the one below, holding the two sides of the fabric together till she finished. And then she pulled them apart.

She looked down at the blue fabric, brilliant in her lamplight, and the crimson and yellow of the great crest. She swallowed, and shook her head in wonder. Then she traced the top of the crest, and the curve of the S, down to where his shirt buttons joined. Her hand looked so small against his chest.

She laid the back of her hand against one pectoral, and looked up at him. "What's your body temperature?"

"Thirty-nine Celsius," he answered softly, looking down at her hand. "About the same as a good fever, for you." Then he looked up at her. "So you see, I really _need_ that second cream and sugar."

She laughed, and then nodded. "I always thought so. When we flew. Twenty-four times, of the sixty-six times you saved my life."

He blinked. He had thought she was only conscious for twenty-one of them.

She cocked her head. "Clark?"

"Hm?"

"Do we look…fragile, to you?"

He looked at her, in her too-big sweatshirt, hair damp from her shower, the bandage on her jaw. He thought of dad holding up the morning's mail, his face a study in shame and grief as he realized he didn't know what do with it. Of mom, a little more stooped each year, her grey eyes still bright and sharp as a fox's.

"Fragile, yes." He thought a moment, then laid her hand in his palm and spread it flat with the other hand. He looked up at her. "I can't see through my own skin."

She blinked.

"But here –" he pointed to her index finger. "I can see the tendons, from the attachment at each joint, till they merge into the muscle." He pointed to her forearm. "And the muscle, to its insertion on the radius." He pointed higher. "And the bone under it…it's not just mineral. It would be brittle, like porcelain. It's shot through with rubbery fibers…they bend, and bounce back. And it's not static, or it would be cobwebbed with cracks, from a few days' work. It's always breaking down, always rebuilding…what?"

Because she had started to laugh, watching him rapt with the brilliance of it. He looked up, a little sheepish.

"No, I'm sorry. It's just…" She trailed off, looking at him, with the old affection in her eyes. Then she looked more solemn. "It's just good to hear you sound like that again."

He blinked.

"You were saying."

He smiled. "So, fragile, yes. But magnificent." He looked up at her features in the lamp light. _And beautiful beyond words._

She smiled. And then her hand went toward his glasses.

His hand shot up at speed, unthinking, to catch her wrist, as it had in his kitchen when she reached for the pot. "Lois…"

Her eyes widened for a moment, looking at his hand. He realized the motion had, in fact, been quicker than her optic pathway. She would have seen his hand vanish, and reappear. "Sorry."

She looked at him, gentle, grave, her eyes full of pity. "Oh," she said quietly. "I hurt you, didn't I? For the last two years. When I was being an idiot."

He laughed, but had trouble meeting her eyes.

She nodded. "We'll leave it. I just…want you to know…that I _can_ be taught."

Clark hesitated a moment. And then he decided he expected the worst far too quickly, and that he did, in fact, need to lighten up.

Still holding her wrist, he guided it up to the bridge of his glasses, and let go.

Lois searched his face for a moment, hesitating. Then something occurred to her and her mouth quirked up. "I only wish," she said, eyes twinkling, "that Lucy could see me now." And she slipped them off.

Without taking her eyes from his face, set them down on the counter. She placed her palms on either side of his face to hold his eyes, and he looked back at her, almost hypnotized, watching for her Superman reaction.

She looked back at him, lucid, steady, patient, more lovely than daylight.

Softly she said, "You have beautiful eyes."

He breathed. Something in his chest unclenched.

After a long moment, she said, "Clark?"

"Yes?"

"I'm going to have to blink now."

He laughed and closed his eyes, and laughed more. Then he looked at her again. "Lois," he said softly. "It was never just you. They're _not_ human. I'm not."

She scooted her stool up behind her and sat back down on it, between his knees.

And then she reached down and took hold of his hand lying on the counter, and turned it palm-up, spreading it with her fingers. "But not alien, either." She laughed a little, and then looked back up at him. "Just a sheep from another fold."

And strangely, wordlessly, it made perfect sense.

It sank into him, and unlocked something else that had been silent all this time. His whole being reeled and flooded, as if he had just taken a breath for the first time in his life. He wanted to laugh like a small child, on the first day of vacation. He wanted to sit there forever in that perfect, jewellike moment.

"_Lois,"_ he got out, too moved to say anything more. He interlaced his fingers with hers, closed his eyes, and wanted never to speak again.

After a long moment, she asked him, "How do you do it?"

He looked up quizzically.

"You had this chance that would be a sort of dark pleasure for most people, to indulge two separate sides of your personality at once, each with no consequence for the other. And _you_…you used it to let you face mortal danger daily _and_ work sixty hours a week for peanuts while Bill Wechsler stole your bylines."

He looked at her gravely. "Well, you see, the _Planet_ coffee cart has those little hazelnut creamers…"

She swatted him, and they laughed. And then they stopped, and looked at each other. All around them was the sea of the uncounted moments of the past years, transformed in hindsight by the light of this one truth. Again he watched her scrolling back, through the firefly glows of one insight after another.

And again he thought of the things his cover had cost her. He closed his eyes a moment. "Lois," he said softly, "that time in Shadyside. With the Mafia."

She looked up, with penetrating eyes. "That one nearly broke you, I think."

He nodded. "It was closer than you can imagine." He looked at her gravely. " 'Sorry' doesn't quite cut it. I know that."

"Clark…"

He shook his head. "I'm not darkening the moment, sweetheart. I only thought you ought to know, that I know. What it's cost you." He looked up at her and barely smiled. "And that, without thinking they're sufficient for a moment, I mean to make you…reparations. Though I think you know, already, that all things in my power are yours, by right, for the asking."

She laughed, and her hand tightened on his. "You'll regret that. I fully intend to let the power corrupt me."

Then she looked more solemn. "But _I'll_ darken the moment a bit. I think we both know what hypocrisy it would be for me to rail about the lengths you go to for your cover. Because it's not just your parents who are sheltered by it."

He growled. "If it weren't for those damned _Enquirer_ articles. The _next_ time that building takes fire, I should watch it burn."

She laughed darkly. "But you haven't seen any for a while, though, have you? I did call a couple of my contacts there, after we talked." Then she cocked her head at him, and looked solemn. "Maybe if they thought of it that way, half the women in Metropolis wouldn't be claiming to have your love-child."

"Oh, for the love of God, Lois, it was just the two, and they weren't even real people…they just ran stock photos." He ran his hand through his hair. He had spent that whole month in fear of that crap filling the Smallville grocery store checkout aisles. "Not to mention the _utter_ absurdity of the whole trans-planetary cross-fertility concept…they'd have better luck with homegrown tree pollen than with me…"

Then he saw her eyes laughing silently, and realized she had finally mastered the deadpan, and he burst out laughing.

Then he grew solemn. "We'll need to talk about that. About insulating you, not about love- children. It's more complicated, with you here in Metropolis. We'll have to plan."

"We may even have varying opinions on it," she said dryly.

He sighed. That was a talk for another day. And then looking at her face, his gaze fell on the bandage again, and his thoughts went from dangers future to dangers past. "Lois…"

"It doesn't hurt any more."

"Are you all right? Otherwise?"

She sighed. "Yes. And no. I think we'll both have dreams for a while, you and I."

"And Jimmy," he agreed.

"And Jimmy. And Howie, and Dawn, and Jason."

And they were both silent, thinking a for a moment of the other member of that little group. A stranger among them, to the end. But not an alien, exactly.

And then he thought of that morning in the station, so many hours ago, seeming so far away. "Lois," he said softly. She looked at him inquiringly.

"So we know Luthorcorp is inside the G.M.P.D."

She nodded slowly. "The guy who took my statement today. Clark, I'm sure of it."

"I know. I heard."

Her mouth quirked up. "That's going to take getting used to. What about yours?"

He shook his head. "She was clean. I'm almost certain." Then he laughed ruefully. "But then, I'm not you, am I?"

She rolled her eyes.

"But there's more." He sighed, and rubbed the back of his neck. "She said…possibly…the Planet too."

Her dark eyes widened. She swallowed.

They said nothing for a long moment.

"Okay," she said finally. "Okay." She looked up at him. "This is just beginning. Isn't it."

He looked at her grimly. "More strange things will happen in Metropolis. I suspect the evidence for a Luthercorp link will always be suggestive, and never conclusive."

"Maybe someday, we'll even find out what he's after."

"Villains have goals?"

"Oh, _Clark_."

He got down off the barstool and took her in his arms again. The first embraces had been frantic. The second had been fierce. Here in her kitchen, surrounded by a beloved city riddled through with dark mysteries, this one was quiet, like coming home, like coffee with two creams and two sugars. Or black and strong.

"On the bright side," he whispered after a long moment, "it turns out Jimmy preset his VCR two days ago, to copy that night's _Law and Order_."

She laughed against him, longer than it really deserved. He looked at the bright little kitchen around them, and then buried his face in her hair and breathed in her shampoo.

_I'm not here to try to invoke an old relationship._ What a fool. Thank God he had lost that battle. The God of Catholics and Protestants and heathen agnostics, and humans and kryptonians, and second chances.

Tomorrow, they would have to take their records off the _Planet _servers, said his nonhuman forebrain. And speak with Abraham Marshall's ex-wife in person.

And meanwhile, some time in the past hour, he realized, the things still unspoken between them had shifted. They had been ambiguous; now they were conspicuous by silence. He could feel them swimming lazily just below the surface, in no hurry to break into the peace of this night, in which so many other things had first been spoken.

They would stand guard over Metropolis together, he and she. They would have to be wise with the people around them - not too trusting, not too afraid to trust. And he would watch for her decision to develop. There was a season for everything, and a time for every purpose under heaven. Enough for now, and more than enough, to be two sheep from different folds.

He laughed to himself, smoothing her hair. Eventually, he was going to have to meet Lucy.


End file.
